What is perhaps most remarkable about this illustration from the Rymsdyks’ Museum Britannicum is how unremarkable the most prominent drawing actually is: Figure 1, the square brick which dominates the upper half of the plate, is drawn with the same meticulous attention to detail that Rymsdyk devotes to the most complex of forms, yet it hardly seems to warrant this de

While a number of the Rymsdyks' illustrations in Museum Britannicum are visually sparse in terms of the number of specimens depicted and the scale by which they are rendered, this particular plate is replete with four figures that fill almost all of the available space.

Among the vast collection of “Sloaniana” in the British Museum, 756 examples of “humana, as calculi, anatomical preparations, &c” were recorded in “An Account of the British Museum,” published in The New London Magazinein July 1788 (378).

The two drawings that comprise this plate are roughly correlated in a more straightforward manner than the vast majority of Rymsdyk’s groupings. Both the Taylor-bird’s nest and the wasp’s nest fall under the general category of natural “wonders” (rather than man-made), and they are both structures built by the creatures for purposes of habitation and reproduction.

The engraving depicts the lower room of the “Old Ashmolean” building at the University of Oxford. Various natural specimens, including a giraffe and a dodo, are evident, as well as two groups of large bones in the foreground. A small table is placed prominently in the center of the image between two parallel rows of ionic columns.