


Sir Walter Raleigh's notes

First English dictionary

Letter about Guy Fawkes

Gunpowder Plot conspirators

The head of Guy Fawkes

Shakespeare's King Lear

The Globe Theatre

King James Bible

Surgeons' tools

Chinese globe

Shakespeare's First Folio

Lotus Sutra

Witch hunting

English Civil War scenes

Execution of Charles I

Agreement of the People

Charles I's executioner

Early A - Z of London

Advert for a quack doctor

Oliver Cromwell as the Devil

A cure for the Plague

Robert Hooke, Micrographia

Great Fire of London map

Great Fire of London

Wren's plans after the fire

Theatrical figures

Dictionary of criminal slang

Games and pastimes

Habeas Corpus Act

Map of the moon

A London Rhinoceros

Henry Purcell

Locke's Two Treatises

East India Company

Account of a shipwreck

Map of South America
The scientist Robert Hooke was a mapmaking pioneer, architect, astronomer, biologist, and ingenious experimenter. He was a founding member and ‘curator of experiments’ at the Royal Society, the national academy of science - a society traditionally at the cutting edge of scientific discovery in Britain. His book 'Micrographia' (shown here), was the first important work on microscopy (the study of minute objects by means of a microscope). First published in 1664, the book contains beautiful illustrations of some of the specimens Hooke viewed under the microscopes that he designed. Among its drawings and observations is this famous and extraordinarily detailed large-scale illustration of a flea.
Shelfmark: 435.e.19, XXXIV