Photo Gallery

Beauty depends on size and order; hence an extremely minute creature could not be beautiful, for our vision becomes blurred as it approaches the point of imperceptibility....
-- Aristotle, Poetics (translation by James Hutton)








 

However, it may not be amiss to add to these remarks upon magnitude, that, as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise: when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively small, and yet
 organized beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of the sense; when we push our discoveries yet downward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller, and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense; we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effects this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And
 Beautiful With Several Other Additions, 1757



 

The background is a photomicrograph of acrylic fibers between crossed polars with a first-order red compensator inserted

 
 
 

Florence Crystals (choline periodide crystals from semen)
Human Sperm Stained With Potassium Iodide and Iodine
Human Sperm Stained With Hematoxylin/Eosin

Go to My Gettysburg Page

Go to My Monocacy Page

Return to My Homepage