Piscium

These striking and sometimes fanciful hand-coloured 18th century engravings were published in Germany in 1777 in a book called 'Piscium, Serpentum, Insectorum, Aliorumque Nonnullorum Animalum'.

The illustrations were produced by Nicholaus Eisenberger and Georg Lichtensteiger. As I was to discover, they had re-engraved in folio format images that originally appeared in Volume II of Mark Catesby's seminal work, 'The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands'.

Catesby's magnum opus was published in London in instalments between 1729 and 1743 and stands as the first comprehensive illustrated natural history work detailing the flora and fauna of America.

[click on any image for an enlarged view; very large versions are also available]

• The plates above were obtained from 'Piscium, Serpentum, Insectorum, Aliorumque Nonnullorum Animalum', online at the Botanicus website. (100 plates of fish, turtles, crustaceans, snakes and insects) [there's a few crustaceans and a couple more fish saved in this set at flickr]
• Better: Volume I and II of 'The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands' at the University of Wisconsin. (equally high resolution plates available : about 240 illustrations in total; it's a matter of taste as to any difference in illustration quality between the illustrations above and in this earlier work, and I'm not certain that every plate is identical to the later German edition {click 'Display gallery view' in the sidebar})
• Easier: 'The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands' [2nd Ed.] at NYPL -- smaller images but you can quickly scan through all of them.
• The Life & Works of Mark Catesby, America’s First Naturalist/Illustrator by Terrance M. Wright.
• Previously.