Micrographia

Micrographia is a book published in 1665 by the English scientist Robert Hooke, in which he recorded his observations made with a microscope he had built himself, along with three telescopic observations. It was the first major publication of the Royal Society of London, which issued it and presented it as a gift to the English monarch. Hooke was about twenty-eight years old at the time.

The book gathers fifty-seven descriptions of very different objects, examined in an unsystematic way and arranged by increasing complexity: first artificial objects, such as the edge of a razor or the point of a needle, which looked blunt under the microscope; then inert materials, such as ice and snow; next the plant world, including cork, fossils and charcoal; and finally the animal kingdom, with twenty-six descriptions that include lice and the compound eye of the fly. The writing is plain and sometimes humorous, and its engravings, remarkable for their artistic quality and in some cases fold-out, revealed to the public aspects of the microscopic world that had been unknown until then.

Its greatest contribution was the path it opened in using instruments for the scientific description of nature. It is here that the term "cell" first appears, applied to the pores seen in a thin slice of cork, which reminded him of the cells of a monastery. Hooke also described the structure of ice, snow and urinary crystals, and his interpretation of microscopic fossils is considered one of the earliest proposals close to the theory of biological evolution.

The book was received with enthusiasm and became the first scientific best-seller, arousing wide public interest in microscopy. Samuel Pepys called it "the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life".