Drone fly

Click on this image to open a larger version. From the Royal Society archive.

Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s first Curator of Experiments, was an investigator of insatiable curiosity. His 1665 book Micrographia contained many novel observations on “minute bodies” made by microscope, expressed as fine illustrations (including this compound insect eye study) which were sensational to his contemporaries. It was in this book that the term “cell” was first used to describe biological structures.