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When you think of a scientific image, what comes to mind? And what should these images – the Milky Way luminous against a black background, hyper-enlarged bacteria wriggling around a Petri dish, brightly coloured ladders of DNA – achieve?

Scientists work with artists and publishing professionals to mediate between layers of expertise and make such visual devices, capable of representing, producing and making tangible new scientific knowledge. Looking at images published before the advent of photography, these layers reveal themselves in particular detail.

If you visit the Royal Society Library and request , a librarian will bring out a large archival box. Gathered within are the illustrations to (among other papers) the ‘Account of an assemblage of fossil teeth’ by . This report of explorations of in Yorkshire was to great acclaim in 1822, and won Buckland the prestigious Copley Medal that year. Historian of geology Martin Rudwick that this paper imagined an ecological past in Britain predating the Biblical Flood, a claim of significant scope in an early nineteenth-century world whose sense of geological temporality was beginning to break from Christian timelines.

Let’s consider for a moment the differences between these drafted pictures and the ‘plates’ that made the final cut. Made by a few different hands – Mary Morland (later Buckland’s wife), and – most of the pictures are gouache renderings of fossils. The page labelled shows three painted teeth (figs. 4, 5 and 6), with a fourth (fig. 7) drawn in pen and ink and pasted beneath fig. 5, a penciled note reading ‘both higher’. Their corresponding plate in the Philosophical Transactions, Plate XXI, shows lithographed versions of the same teeth neatly centred on the page, figures 5 and 7 shifted upwards as requested:

(L) manuscript page PT/73/9/22; (R) the Phil Trans printed plate XXI

Earlier in the printed paper, Plate XVI provides a naturalistic rendering of two people approaching an overgrown wall, a small schematic of Kirkdale Cave, and a bird’s eye view of its interior passages:

But if you flip to , Plate XVI’s manuscript draft is a mess of ink, with descriptions scratched out and rewritten in a rough hand; the birds-eye map takes up additional paper:

It was important to make such tweaks before submitting a draft. Without the handy functionality of a word processor, nineteenth-century paper drafts had to be as perfect as possible. Every letter in every word Buckland wrote would become a discrete stamp, meaning a typesetter had to sit down and fit tiny blocks of (often) lead alloy into a printer’s ‘forme’ (a large frame of text) before this was inked and pressed onto a page. While errors in writing and placement could be modified by swapping in a different piece of type, preparing images involved a separate process. How, exactly, did painted illustrations go from brushstrokes to stamped prints?

Making a printable image requires a printmaker to mark individual lines into a wood, stone or metal ‘matrix’, usually a block or plate. These matrices are static, with lines carved into them serving to reject or hold ink. Making changes to a completed image involves sanding the entire surface down, or turning the plate over and starting again on the reverse.

Formed using fine, discrete lines, engraved or etched prints were usually monochrome in nature, and acted without using colours to produce gradients in shadow or light. Colour printing was possible in the nineteenth century, using multiple inking techniques, coloured lithography, or by hand-colouring after printing; but such work was labour-intensive and expensive. Rather, printmakers varied the relationships between lines on the matrix to evoke form. A mass of parallel lines suggests a plane. When those lines curve in the same direction they can imply a curved surface, while hatching other lines at cross angles can render that form deeper and darker. Look carefully at , one of Mary Morland’s paintings of a hyena jaw:

Do you see how Morland alternated inked lines with washes of gouache to create a three-dimensional form on the two-dimensional page? Now observe figure 2 of Plate XVIII:

The engraver, , has rendered the same form using only parallel and crosshatched lines – un-inked spaces representing the lightest and nearest parts of the fossil, the most crosshatched sections receding along undulating bone. Tracing or freehand-drawing Morland’s image onto his matrix, Basire had to decide where and to what degree shadows lay on the fossil, encoding in his hands and eyes particular kinds of crosshatching to represent differences in shadow and colour. When an original image lacked the detail Morland had included, there were fewer artistic judgements for the engraver to make. Returning to figure 7 of PT/73/9/22 and plate XXI, do you see how the original inked drawing involves comparatively little shading? Especially next to its painted neighbours, figure 7 appears much more schematic, more akin to the maps in Plate XVI.

The process of producing publishable scientific images in the nineteenth century required an eye capable of perceiving what three-dimensional form a two-dimensional image had been rendering. While Mary Morland could base her work on an object directly in front of her, Basire worked from her painting. Printed images were therefore usually two layers of artistic mediation away from the object, and inherently tied up in the judgment of the engraver. Yet like the ‘objective’ cameras that were beginning to emerge, the best printmakers and draftsmen were considered conduits of reality rather than producers of their own perspectives.

In 1842, the inaugural address of the  touted engraving’s ability to enable readers to ‘grasp the very form and presence of events as they transpire, in all their substantial reality’. Twenty years on from Buckland’s ‘Account’, prints represented reality on the page. And yet, comparing Buckland’s draft with its published corollary shows a printer’s perspective in the making: Basire’s skill integral to Buckland’s published geological insights.