India, Oct. 25 -- In 1665 the recently founded Royal Society of London (for Improving of Natural Knowledge) published as its inaugural book the extraordinary Micrographia by Robert Hooke. Micrographia contains Hooke's exquisite drawings and detailed written observations of diverse substances (silk, Muscovy glass, sand); of objects (the point of a needle); of parts of plants (poppy seeds, nettle stings); and of animals (insects, sponges, the teeth of a snail, feathers); all of them observed in extraordinary and unprecedented detail using his magnifying glasses and microscopes.

Hooke's most famous image, of a flea magnified to 300 times its natural size, revealed to human eyes for the first time the astounding intricacy that characterises ...