A study of metamorphosis: more than 300 years ago, Maria Sibylla Merian set out for Suriname to pursue her life's passion--moths and butterflies--and in the process enriched scientific understanding.

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A study of metamorphosis: more than 300 years ago, Maria Sibylla Merian set out for Suriname to pursue her life's passion--moths and butterflies--and in the process enriched scientific understanding.

IF A WOMAN IN HER FIFTIES were to disembark today from a cruise ship in Suriname bent on scientific pursuits, no one would think it odd. But in 1699, when 52-year-old Maria Sibylla Merian arrived from Amsterdam to spend years unraveling the mysteries of metamorphosis like a cocoon of silk, it was anything but usual.

Before Alexander Von Humboldt or Charles Darwin headed for South America, Merian blazed a scientific path that still shines brightly today. One of the first students of the rainforest, she had published her own volume on flowers and three on caterpillars in Europe to serious acclaim before her historic journey. In Plants and Empire: Cohynial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Londa Schiebinger calls Merian "the only European woman who voyaged exclusively in pursuit of her science in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries." In her outstanding 2007 biography of Merian, Chrysalis, Kim Todd says, "The claim that Merian was the first to plan a journey rooted solely in science is based on the f...

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