Terrible wonder

摘要

Venturing upstairs in Berlin's Museum fur Gegenwart (Museum for Contemporary Art), we enter a darkened space inhabited by alien creatures, eerily spotlit in glass cases.rnThe specimens in the exhibition, Die Sammlungen (The Collections), exude an air of menace. As we look more carefully, we begin to recognize some of the monsters as familiar insects, most obviously Musca domestica, the common housefly, and Pulex irritans, the flea, immortalized in Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665. The models, enlarged by a factor of 100, recall Hooke's comment about the terrible wonder of such magnified insects. He described the flea he viewed down his microscope as "adorn'd with a curiously polish'd suit of sable Armour, neatly jointed, and beset with multitudesrnof sharp pinns, shap'd almost like Porcupine's Quills, or bright conical Steel-bodkins".