Volume 1, Plate I, Skeletons of Various Fruits, Albertus Seba

Albertus Seba’s 18th-century publication Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri, better known simply as his Thesaurus, provided a wealth of botanical and zoological information. The four-volume study describes, illustrates, and categorizes a variety of naturalia from the author’s own extensive and celebrated cabinet of curiosities. Although Seba died before completing the last two volumes, he managed to produce the illustrations for books III and IV to which textual descriptions were added and falsely attributed to him because of the credibility of his name. In this plate, Seba illustrates the intravenous systems, or “skeletons,” of a number of fruits, including pears, a quince, apples, peaches, an apricot, and a plum, along with that of a mushroom.