Zoonomia, or, The laws of organic life : vol. I / by Erasmus Darwin, M.D. F.R.S. author of The botanic garden.
Erasmus Darwin's medical and physiological treatise Zoonomia, volume one, reprinted in New York by T. & J. Swords in 1796 for American physicians and natural philosophers. The plates are small circular optical diagrams — concentric rings washed in flat yellow and grey-blue, and a word set inside a ruled disc — used to demonstrate ocular spectra and afterimages; a later steel-engraved oval vignette of a brick institutional building appears among them, giving designers hand-tinted target forms, letterpress type in a circle, and a compact architectural cut.
