Maria Sibylla Merian was one of the most remarkable observers of insects of the later seventeenth century, a period when many remarkable individu als turned their attention to those “lesser living creatures.”1 Highly respected by her eighteenth-century successors, including Carl Linnaeus, her star faded in the nineteenth century as entomology became increasingly professional ized, and as inaccurate reproductions of her copperplate engravings circulated far more widely than her original drawings and the books printed during her lifetime.2 In this volume, Kay Etheridge demonstrates amply that Merian de serves to be recognized, as her contemporaries understood, as one of the pio neers of the study of insects, and in particular, as an innovator in the study of relations between insects and their host plants.