 Because of the very constrained space, the illustrations in The Natural History of Europe, are at a disadvantage in all comparisons - but precisely because of this they provide a useful illumination of the problems. Compared to Ursing Eigener's drawing is more schematic (which may have been an appropriate strategy in awareness of the space limitations he would have to meet). Eigener uses a fairly heavy outline of a fairly uniform colour and even so avoids to present any side views of the flowers that would place the white petals against a white background. This gives the impression that the flowers have been drawn by template - a standard set of pen strokes - and the shapes of leaves have something of a similar stereotyped feel. The single row of hairs, which is an important character for the Stellaria media has been rendered by pen strokes on both sides of the stems. For the reading eye on the printed page, however, this exaggeration is only visible as a slight fuzziness to the stems - so it is probably not as misleading as it could be. Making these comparisons and features I feel strongly that the illustrations are, in many respects, not given a fair treatment. From this sentiment some useful observations may be made about what is excluded by the "analytical" procedure:
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Eigener's Stellaria mediaA piece of useful jetsom from a previous life of mine, The Natural History of Europe, was first published in 1962 in German as Pflanzen und Tiere Europas. According to amazon.de and www.westermann.de the author, Harry Garms, still has a key to flora and fauna in print at the Georg Westermann Verlag - a plain websearch does not tell me if the illustrations are also still those by Wilhelm Eigener. A Google search on "wilhelm eigener" turns up some thirty links, mostly to antiquariats or libraries - and one to a site for vintage posters. From the looks of it Eigener was mainly a zoological illustrator (I should look him up in the German encyclopedias).The English edition of the Natural History has been edited for British conditions, and provided with an introduction by Gerald Durrell - who wishes that he had had access to this book 25 years ago, as a budding naturalist. He praises Garms for the successful undertaking of this Herculean task - but does not mention the illustrator by name when predicting that "this guide will prove to be absolutely indispensable to anyone interested in natural history who travels in Britain or on the Continent. It is compact and concise and the illustrations make identification easy." If there is any further information in the book itself about the production of the illustrations, it is well hidden. The Stellaria media here to the left was scanned at a resolution of 300 dpi, just like the version by Ursing and post-processed in the same minimal fashion. This magnified image, too, reveals the artist's rendering of the typical fine hairs on the stems of the Chickweed - invisible to me when I gaze at the page with my reading spectacles. The pages of the Natural History mix text fields and illustration fields: in the vertical center of the page there is a horizontal band of illustrations, with a couple of smaller illustration fields in the top and bottom outer corners of the page. The Stellaria media shares one of these smaller fields (bottom right) with three relatives (below). The pages in this book do not look crowded - but the illustrations in the corner fields often do. In the case of the Stellaria media it overlaps with its neighbour. If you already know your Chickweed it is of course fully recognizable against the others from the same genus presented in the same field - the question is if it will catch your eye if you are browsing the Field Garden and Park section with an unidentified sample in your hand (there are no keys in this book). Stellaria multimedia. 
Illustration (3,5 X 3,5 cm) by Wilhelm Eigener in H. Garms, The Natural History of Europe, Feltham, Middlesex: Paul Hamlyn (second printing 1968) |