Dig Deeper: Leuckart's zoological wall charts

The use of large scientific wall charts as teaching aids became popular in universities in the second half of the nineteenth century, both in Europe and North America. Leuckart’s series was significant for its size and quality of artistic detail. There were 101 wall charts in his series on invertebrates, and 12 on vertebrates, of which this lungfish poster was one.

Production of the charts was technologically challenging and labor-intensive. Their size required that they be printed in four sections, before being joined together and touched up. A complete set cost more than twice as much as the most expensive microscope of the time, yet they sold widely. Unfortunately, very few of the charts have survived. An almost complete collection, with full explanatory texts, was discovered in the 1990s at the University of Pavia in Italy. Only one other nearly complete series with explanatory texts is known to exist -- at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

The images on this chart were created by Hinrich Nitsche (1845-1902), a German biologist and artist born in Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland), who was an assistant to Rudolf Leuckart and responsible for the artwork on 16 of the charts. His initials “HN” are in the lower right corner.