Talk:Book - Normal Plates of the Development of Vertebrates 10

Normal plate on the development of the South American lungfish. The Cambridge-trained zoologist John Graham Kerr travelled to the swamps of the Gran Chaco in Paraguay in search of the South American lungfish, Lepidosiren. Here he met the Paisiapto or ‘black-food people’ cooking their supper, and devoured ‘a plate of the cooked lungfish … “con mucho gusto”, for the flesh, rich with its deep orange red fat, was most tasty’. Kerr’s old Cambridge professor was scandalized by his report of the lungfish dinner, a ‘sacrilegious use of the sacred Lepidosiren’, but the Indians helped find abundant spawn. In this normal plate the regular arrangement heightens the sense of confident mastery of the whole of early development.

Lithograph by Adolf Giltsch after drawings by A. Kirkpatrick Maxwell from John Graham Kerr, Normal plates on the development of Lepidosiren paradoxa and Protopterus annectens, Jena: Fischer, 1909, plate I. Original dimensions of border 26.3 x 20.0 cm.