15a. Friedrich Justin Bertuch.
Bilderbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnügen der Jugend.
Prague: Peter Bohmanns Erben, 1822-1827.
Detail from plate showing various magnifications of a fly’s
head.
15. Thomas Boreman.
A Description of a Great Variety of Animals and Vegetables.
London: J. T. for Thomas Boreman, 1736.
One of the first English natural history books written especially
for children featured several plates about insects, including this
one about the blue fly. Boreman, who was also author of a work on the
culture of silk worms, compiled this text from important contemporary
works of science and exploration, such as Robert Hooke's Micrographia.
As those books were prohibitively expensive for many people interested
in the new science, Boreman wanted to make their contents more widely
available. In his account of this insect, Boreman observed how beautifully
its foot had been designed so that it was able to walk perpendicularly
up any kind of surface and cling there as long as it liked. His enthusiasm
for this noxious creature would have been regarded by many of his contemporaries
as somewhat mad.