These are the remarkable plates with which his work was illustrated, particularly his famous Kunstformen. Every living cell has psychic properties, and the psychic life of multicellular organisms is the sum-total of the psychic functions of the cells of which they are composed. Multitude of strangely beautiful natural forms: Radiolaria, Foraminifera, Ciliata, diatoms, calcareous sponges, Siphonophora, star corals, starfishes, Protozoa, flagellates, brown seaweed, jellyfishes, sea-lilies, moss animals, sea-urchins, glass sponges, leptomedusae, horny corals, trunkfishes, true sea slugs, anthomedusae horseshoe crabs, sea-cucumbers, octopuses, bats, orchids, sea wasps, seahorse, a dragonfish, a frogfish, much more. This particular edition is a nice large format book and while the colours may be slightly muted on the matte paper, the plates are still gorgeous to look at and quite clear enough for reference, which is why I bought it.

As a consequence of these views Haeckel was led to deny the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will, and the existence of a personal God.His work was credited with having caused the acceptance of Darwinism in Europe, and his popular studies ― preaching the continuity of all life, organic and inorganic, from prehistoric time to the present ― converted tens of thousands of readers all over the world. The Canvas and the Camera in Weimar Germany: A New Objectivity in Painting and Photography of the 1920s. Expect to see pages devoted to seaweeds, seaslugs, jellyfish, crustaceans, bats, fish and reptiles for example. In addition to being marvelous renderings, these plates have long been noted for the peculiar emotional appeal that they have for most viewers, a premonition of surrealism with exotic organic life forms stretching back to their roots in the inorganic, and individual details drawn with awareness of subtle evolutionary changes and millennia-long developments.

The introductory section is detailed and well-written (for an older audience than my son, of course) but Haeckel's images speak clearly without the need for explanation. The line drawing illustrations are really beautiful and a great source of inspiration for Lino printing.I had heard of Ernst Haeckel back in high school, his art is exceptionally captivating - so when I saw this book at the library, I didn’t hesitate on taking it home. In a beautiful celebration of the natural world, Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature is a masterful union of science and art. Moreover, the firmly established perceptions of mathematics and physics, which Kant explained as synthetic a priori judgements, originated by means of the phyletic development of the faculty of judgement and may be traced back to continually recurring a posteriori experiences and conclusions based thereupon.

it had been badly trimmed so that approximately one inch of the outer edge of every page was missing.However, the wonderful ability to make a priori judgements has arisen through the inheritance of cerebral structures, which the vertebrate ancestors of humans acquired slowly and in stages (through adaptation and synthetic association of a posteriori experiences and perceptions). What he termed the integration of his views on these subjects he published under the title of Die Welträtsel (1899), which in 1901 appeared in English as The Riddle of the Universe.