Volume 1, Plate IV, Deciduous Leaves from Various Plants, 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 the leaves of a New Guinean massoy tree (a genus of evergreen trees belonging to the laurel family), along with four leaves, a flowering body, seed pods, and seeds from a plant identified to Seba only as a Caribbean “maizy tree,” but which he notes closely resembles a Lathyrus plant (a genus in the legume family). The lower register depicts leaves from an undetermined New Guinean plant that Seba calls a “gilala tree,” and the East Indian Syzygium jambos (sometimes called Rose apples, from the family Myrtaceae) and Ixora alba L. (from the family Rubiaceae) trees.