Featured on PDR in the collection Floating Phantoms: A. G. Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910)

There is something inevitable about Alfred Goldsborough Mayer’s attraction to jellyfish. Like Ernst Haeckel before him, Mayer could never “remain insensible to the rare grace of form and delicate beauty of color of these creatures of the sea”. While Haeckel’s highly-stylized illustrations of Medusae are widely celebrated, the seventy-six color plates of Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910) — in three quarto-size volumes comprising 735 pages of text and 428 line figures — are almost entirely unknown to all but specialists. Each figure is executed with an eye toward satisfying the exacting taxonomic task of classifying jellyfish’s bewildering diversity. Poorly known in Mayer’s day, Medusae of the World described 565 species of Hydromedusae — mostly small jellyfish commonly called the “veiled medusae” for the presence…