Science Art: Aequorea Forbesiana by Philip Henry Gosse.

Gosse_Aequorea_Forbesiana
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This is a jellyfish drawn by Philip Henry Gosse, a naturalist and Creationist (!) who gave us the word “aquarium” as a place to see marine creatures. Before Gosse, an aquarium was a place to water cattle.

He built the very first public one as the “Fish House” of the London Zoo in 1853.

A few years later, he published a book trying to prove that fossils couldn’t disprove Genesis because of course the act of creation would make things appear to be older than they are. It was called Omphalos: an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot because part of his argument was that Adam would have been created with a navel, even though no umbilical cord, no womb, no mother.

This illustration isn’t from that book, though. It’s from A naturalist’s rambles on the Devonshire coast.

I found this picture, and learned about Gosse, on the Scientific Illustration tumblr.