WEIRD SCIENCE

I've been eating up the insights on the site Strange Science. This site is a tremendous help in writing my thesis about scientific history and the blunders along the road of progress. Some of my favorite material comes from the Goof Gallery, a collection of fantastical mistakes.

This text for the above image is lifted from strangescience.net:
"Year: 1668
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: Dendrologia
Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg
Aldrovandi's posthumously published book showed this piece of apple bark with an uncanny resemblance to a human face. A little too uncanny, in fact. In the 16th and 17th centuries, savants were still trying to figure out the details how life forms reproduced and what made fossils. One common idea was of a "plastick virtue" — a creative force that fashioned all kinds of weird objects. Such a force might make a human-looking face in apple bark. Or an artist simply might draw it."