Abstract

What happens when you take the idea of the biblical Adam—the first human—and apply it to insects? You create an origin story for Nature’s tiniest creatures, one that gives them 'a Pedigree as ancient as the first creation'. This the naturalist Robert Hooke argued in his treatise, the Micrographia (1665). In what follows, I will retrace how Hooke endeavoured to show that insects—then widely believed to have arisen out of the dirt—were the products of an ancient lineage. These genealogies, while constructed from empirical observation, were conjectures of the imagination. Section 2 shows how Hooke introduced the concept of a 'prime parent' (an Adam-insect) to explain the anatomical similarities between 'mites'. Section 3 demonstrates how Hooke defined the family of 'gnats' as tiny machines built from the same components and relates Hookean genealogies to contemporary ideas about Noah’s Ark. Section 4 shows how Hooke outlined the morphology of 'insects' (delineating what we now call arthropods). Section 5 explores how Hooke used fossils to study these animals in the distant past. In sum, Hooke was turning natural history—collecting and describing insects—into natural history: reconstructing their origins.