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A Woman's Place
Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis. Kim Todd. 2007. Harcourt, Inc., New York. 328 pp., hardbound. $27.
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As a toddler, Maria Sibylla Merian had an "odd and dirty interest in insects." Born in 1647 in Frankfurt, Merian lived in the midst of the scientific revolution in Europe, when people were beginning to look at the world differently and more closely, and to ask questions about what they saw.
In the realm of biology, this was a heady time. European explorers were discovering the people, plants, and animals of previously unknown worlds. The first use of a microscope revealed a new world of small creatures and small parts of bigger ones. It was the dawn of embryology, as people tried to show how an egg developed into a chicken. Thinkers were doing the first experiments—a new word—to find out whether insects and other "lowly" animals really arose through spontaneous generation. And it was recognized for the first time that the various stages of an insect's life—egg, larva, pupa, and adult—were different forms of the same individual, not different animals altogether.
The names of the men who led this revolution in biology are at least vaguely familiar to anyone who took high-school biology: Robert Hooke (father of modern science), Jan Swammerdam (father of entomology), Antony van Leeuwenhoek (father of microbiology), Marcello Malphigi (father of comparative physiology and microscopic anatomy), and Francesco Redi (father of biological experimentation) were leading lights still remembered for their contributions.
However, Merian, their contemporary, doesn't appear in textbooks, although she was once as well-known as these men and is arguably the mother of ecology and of scientific illustration. Unarguably, Merian was a remarkable woman who escaped the confines most of her sex lived within in a male-dominated society to become the first person (not just the first woman) to undertake "a purely scientific journey to do field research in a foreign country."
Growing up in and later marrying into families of artists, engravers, and printers gave Merian unusual freedom to learn to paint (in watercolors—women were forbidden to paint in oils) and unusual access to books and conversations about the new scientific ideas swirling around Europe's intellectual capitals. Inspired by new ideas about insects and metamorphosis, for years she documented and painted the life stages of moths and butterflies in the gardens and backyards of her various homes. She brought larvae into her kitchen, carefully tending them until they pupated and emerged as adults, so she could match caterpillar to butterfly. But she never lost sight of the insects' natural habitat.
In 1679, she published her first major work: The Caterpillar's Wondrous Metamorphosis and Particular Nourishment from Flowers…through a completely new invention the origin, food and development of caterpillars…and other such creatures, including their times and characteristics are diligently studied, briefly described from nature, painted, engraved….
Merian's entirely new invention was to show insects as members of a community. Caterpillars rested on the plants they ate. Pupae, cocoons, and adults appeared on the same page. Adults were shown laying eggs on a plant, which bore telltale signs of caterpillar bites. Predators were sometimes included. This had simply never been done before. Her book was widely acclaimed and for the next 20 years, Merian continued to study and paint insect life histories.
Then, in 1699, at the age of 52, Merian journeyed, alone but for her young daughter, from Amsterdam to Surinam with the express purpose of studying and illustrating its insects and plants. For two years, she explored Surinam's flora and fauna, working in her garden as well as deep in the rainforest. Realizing that much of the rainforest diversity was out of reach in the trees, she climbed ladders to see it and had trees chopped down when a ladder wasn't enough, foreshadowing modern efforts to study life in the rainforest canopy.
Returning to Amsterdam, she spent five years preparing her monumental Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, published in 1705. Again, she depicted insects in their ecological settings, made more marvelous by the novelty of the new plants and animals she described. She was the first, for instance, to describe and paint a bird-eating spider with a bird in its web. This book sealed her reputation as a leading natural historian, and throughout the 1700s she was cited regularly in the scientific literature. In the 1800s, though, she fell out of favor and her work was dismissed. By the 1900s, she was forgotten.
In Chrysalis, Kim Todd attempts to bring Merian back into the limelight. Part biography, part social history, part history of science, Chrysalis paints a beautiful portrait of Merian's life and work, convincing me that this amazing woman has a rightful place in the pantheon of the founders of biology.
—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer 3(2) 2007. Copyright 2007 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
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