We couldn’t be more fortunate than to have access to a book that is over 350 years old and usually resides in an air conditioned locked, humidity controlled room at the Cathedral library.
Emma Laws, Exeter Cathedral Librarian and Mother to two Exeter Cathedral School pupils, spent yesterday afternoon revealing the very first illustrations of microorganisms ever to be published to current Year 7 pupils.
This compliments the Cells and Structures topic for the start of the Year 7 Science course; each class was taken to view up close and personal the delights that Robert Hooke enthused about in his book entitled “Micrographia” published in 1665.
Incredibly complex drawings were examined to find evidence of Hooke’s first attempt at scientific labelling of a drawing, his illustrations included frozen slides of his own urine, the complexity of a full stop ink mark and the detail of a flea which he described thus:
“as for the beauty of it, the Microscope manifests it to be all over adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suit of sable Armour, neatly jointed, and beset with multitudes of sharp pinns, shap’d almost like Porcupine’s Quills”.
It is an incredible privilege to work within the grounds of an ancient cathedral, not the least of which is our pupils having access to such stimulating and awe-inspiring experiences.
