In 1741, Jacques Gautier d’Agoty asserted his position as the inventor of tri-color mezzotint, advertising his process in the pages of the Mercure de France December 1741, with an image of a Drap d’or shell. This article takes the shell as a case study to demonstrate one way in which Gautier’s early artistic experimentation with print processes fed his later natural philosophical theorizing, which he published in the pages of his new scientific journal, the Observations (1752–1757). The burr of the Drap d’or’s copperplate, the stratigraphy of its tonal inking, and the corrosive action of its mordant informed Gautier’s conception of shell discoloration as a process based on the collapse of a mollusk’s surface texture and the movement of salts in and out of its pores. His first-hand experience of achieving mechanical color impressions with mezzotint furnished him with an artistic metaphor with which he could then comprehend a natural process.

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In 1662, the physician Christopher Merret presented his fellow members of the Royal Society with an English translation of Antonio Neri's “L'arte vetraria” (The art of glass, 1612). Central to the preparation and receipt of this book was a cache of objects relevant to glassmaking, now lost or dispersed. These materia vitraria served as a tangible appendix to Merret's written commentary. They also reified the society's interest in the development of domestic industry by offering a direct means by which fellows could appreciate the raw materials of contemporary glassmaking alongside evidence of the trade's longer history in the British Isles.

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The tercentenary of the 1720 South Sea Bubble saw a flurry of interest in The Bubblers Medley (fig. 1), a satirical trompe-l'oeil print published by Thomas Bowles II and sold at his London shop soon after the stock market collapsed. 1 Yet for all the attention paid to the medley's printed items-news clippings, illustrated verse, a playing card-one figure got short shrift: the naked boy blowing soap bubbles in the lower righthand corner. 2