From our UK edition
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) A warm wall, heavy leaves, hard green grapes and a cluster of berries spun out of cobweb. They were packed with brown roe, or, later, an anarchy of hatchlings, scattering crawlers scarce larger than the eggs they once were, two eye-dots on a body the shape of an egg. I counted nine scales at the rear end, two whiskers, a two-pronged tail six legs underneath.
From our UK edition
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) Their world is a glass of rainwater. They move up and down through the clearness, swallowing their way, or hang by their tails from the surface: tiny transparent caterpillars with their bristled segments of body, horned trophies of head. The glass holds nothing that I can see, but they find matter to eat in it, which pulses through a black thread of gut. They graze what they breathe, the blank element they dangle in. After some days, I observed their heads to fatten and grow monstrous, the tails to curl and dwindle. They floated head-up now, like commas, not feeding, yet they were still alive – poked, they tumbled beneath the surface.