PA Photos and Documents

Bound manuscript volume containing fifty-seven pages of 129 watercolor illustrations of butterflies, moths, caterpillars and chrysalids, beetles, flies, locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets; five drawings of insects with plants; and one drawing of a guinea pig. The illustrations, created by Alexander Marshal and others are drawn on scraps of paper or vellum that may have been cut from a sketch book or manuscript and later assembled into an album. In some cases, the illustrations were drawn on the blank side of a letterpress text including seven drawings on pages of Cotes’s translation of T. Mouffet’s Theater of Insects (London : Printed by E. Cotes, 1658). Descriptions and natural history observations are written on the front and back of many of the illustrations by at least four different people. Some of these annotations were applied after the illustrations were mounted and the volume assembled, possibly in the nineteenth century.