This is a scientific illustration done as a paper collage; that is, Philip Gosse took a sheet of paper, painted it as black as space, then glued white and colored tissue over it to create the likeness of creatures (technically, protozoa) observed through a microscope. The top one is an amoeba, and the bottom one is a “sun animalcule” in the Actinophrys genus. There’s something Lovecraftian about them (and in fact Lovecraft may have been as directly inspired by Gosse as he was by Haeckel, both illustrators of the late 1800s), but also reminiscent of 1960s Star Trek and vintage Richard Powers science-fiction covers.
Actinophrys is nowadays known as a “heliozoa” because it resembles a sun, or a drawing of the sun – a single-celled creature with a spherical body that radiates lots of stiff, slender “axopodia” which are (in a Lovecraftian way, again), long pseudopods made of spiraling microtubules that the critters use for gathering food, though also for locomotion. They are limbs that are also mouths and feet.
Gosse was an English marine biologist who coined the word “aquarium” to describe the big tank he maintained to display somewhat larger sea creatures at the London Zoo. His manual on aquariums ignited a craze for them across Victorian England. His later book, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot tried to reconcile the latest scientific information about the geologic ages of Earth (dinosaur fossils in Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, lots of trilobites and armored fish in the Devonian) with the biblical account of Creation. The book got its name from Gosse’s idea that Adam was created with an omphalos, a belly button, even though he never had a mother. God made things as they are in such a way that they would appear older.
Gosse’s friend Reverend Charles Kingsley refused to review the book, telling Gosse in a letter: “…[I]f we accept the fact of absolute creation, God becomes Deus quidam deceptor [‘God who is sometimes a deceiver’]. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in the one single case of your newly created scars on the pandanus trunk, your newly created Adam’s navel, you make God tell a lie.”
Darwin had not yet published when Omphalos came out, but Gosse already knew of his research and wrote very highly of it in the book. I’m not sure if Darwin had anything to say about his mentions in Omphalos, but scientists in general weren’t any more fond of the book than theologians were, because it was an untestable hypothesis: If everything we see is made to look older by an omnipotent being, there’s no way to prove the age of anything, ever. Nowadays, this idea is called “the omphalos hypothesis.” The cosmic horror of a trickster God also sounds a little like Lovecraft, if you think about it.
The image came from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, but I found it on Wikimedia Commons.