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.

• Author: Reidell, Heidi

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 fact that virtually everyone who came before conducted investigations as a sideline to some other work: soldier, surgeon, doctor, pirate."

Maria Sibylla Merian inherited talent and persistence. Trained as an artist, she produced fine silks, satins, and linens painted with designs that she published and sold. Merian's lifelong passion was discovering which caterpillar and plant produced what silk moth or butterfly. In preparation for the trip to Suriname, the divorced single mother sold 255 of her own paintings to outfit herself and her young daughter to continue the single-minded pursuit she had begun at age thirteen--metamorphosis and the complete life cycle of moths and butterflies.

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"This research I started in Frankfurt, in 1660," Merian captioned her first known illustration of a silkworm. That study book, kept until her death in 1717, was purchased on the day of her funeral by an agent for Peter the Great. Charles Darwin's grandfather quoted her work in his book The Botanic Garden. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus relied on her accuracy. The noted physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane kept a complete copy of her hand-illustrated prints, one of only three known.

A wise woman was in constant danger when superstition collided with science. Knowledge of "worms" or caterpillars was suspicious for a woman in the seventeenth century; it could get you killed for being a witch, especially if you were from Germany, where more unconventional women met death than in any other European country. Pliny's opinions still held scientific sway; he thought some life forms sprang from dew. Folk wisdom said insects appeared by spontaneous generation or other mysterious means; live flies came from dead ones, if first sprinkled with honey; and scorpions would appear from a cocktail of sweet basil, sand, and horse dung stored in a cellar. And what your mother looked at in pregnancy marked you for life. Merian's mother, curiously, had seen an insect collection.

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Born in 1647 into an accomplished publishing family, Maria Merian grew up in Frankfurt, worked in Nurnberg, and blossomed in Amsterdam. As a child surrounded by adult siblings--already accomplished artists and engravers who were working on books and maps of the New World--Maria developed a worldview that was more expansive than most. Her father, the printer Matthaus Merian, had inherited the engraved plates of Grand Voyages, or Historie Americae, by Theodore de Bry, which illustrated the adventures of 35 early explorers. The images in this series--depicting Balboa, Captain John Smith and the Powhatans, cannibals, flying fish, and mermaids---must have made an impression on the young girl, who lost her father at age three. Her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, was also an artist of note with a brother in the silk trade. But her stepfather left when she was twelve, leaving her mother with fewer rights to work than if she had been widowed. In the strict guild systems of Europe, women could work in watercolor but not in oil.

Moths and "summer birds"--her name for butterflies--had the young Maria by the heart. Aristotle called butterflies "Psyche," meaning breath or soul. Larvae means masks or hobgoblins, cocoon is...