Add MS 5260

Please note that this album contains anatomical drawings.

Drawings of animal and human anatomy executed in a variety of techniques, chiefly related to Samuel Collins' comparative anatomy book A Systeme of Anatomy, treating the body of man, beasts, birds, fish, insects and plants (London, 1685). All drawings are executed on paper, pasted on the folios of the album and arranged in the same order as the corresponding engravings in Collins's book. The only exception is item 13, which is an anatomical engraving.

Most of the drawings include an inscription in English indicating the subject matter of the drawing and a cross-reference to the corresponding plate in Collins' publication. Item 33, a pen and ink drawing of the female organs of reproduction copied from a plate in Jan Swammerdam's Miraculum Naturae sive Uteri muliebris Fabrica (Leiden, 1672), is signed in bottom left corner 'W. Faithorne fecit'.

Items 29-32, possibly also by Faithorne, are pen and ink studies of male organs of reproduction, copied from Reinier de Graaf's De virorum organis generationi Inservientibus (Leiden, 1668).

Items 47 and 189 are pen and ink drawings after two anatomy plates in Johannes Vesling's Syntagma Anatomicum (Padua, 1647). The unnumbered item on the verso of f. 43 is a letter addressed to Samuel Collins in London, written by 'Ch. Cheyne', dated 25 January. 'Ch. Cheyne' is likely Lord Charles Cheyne, Viscount of Newhaven, to whom Collins wrote a dedicatory letter included in the second volume of A Systeme of Anatomy.