JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

In his long and vastly productive scientific life, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919 ) produced extraordinary and beautiful work.  He was a busy man working over a number of specialties, writing more than 40 books and a large number of  contributions to scientific publications.  He is perhaps best remembered early on in his career for a popular defense of Darwinism, writing Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, (1868, nine years after the publication of the Origin, and translated into English as The History of Creation in 1876) which was a successful attempt to get Darwin’s complex ideas into public discussion.  Next to that he is probably best remembered today for his biological work and for describing thousands of new species of life forms.  Today though he came up (again) in reference to the display of scientific images and data, which takes us to his fantastic work in the description of the radiolaria and the display of his results.  I was interested in symmetry and the filling-up-of-page-space without actually crowding the paper–in this, Haeckel was a master, his work is breathtaking.  Here are a couple of examples of his work, along with a link for more images coming from 19thCenturyScience.org: