Natural History Cabinet, Fishes

In this frontispiece interlocutor gesture, three boys and a girl capture and examine water animals from a pond. Their joyful activity suggests a parallel between the collection, examination, and cataloguing of fish inside of the book and the same activity that readers should perform in the world, as another way to “read” and label nature. The same dog appears in the Birds frontispiece, which suggests these images all feature the same fictional family. Although these miniature books are strict catalogues without any fictional characters or story elements, the frontispiece siblings connect the cabinet with conventions used in familial science books, which typically do feature an exemplary wealthy family of four or five siblings who collect specimens and learn through conversation.