Alchemical manuscripts - Cabala

When you have water, that is Mercury of the Air,
that is of the Stone and Air of Fire, that is Spirit
of Mercury and fire that is Mercury of the Earth,
that is of Luna, then you shall have the Art fully.

Aristotle

Early 20th Century Illustrations from Japanese Children's Books

I imagine that yes is the only living thing

E. E. Cummings

Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing

Kitab Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat

literally "The Wonders of Creation and the Curiosities of Existence", or

Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing

Merchant from Isfahan Flying


Kitab Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat, literally "The Wonders of Creation," compiled in the middle 1200s in what is now Iran or Iraq. The vibrantly illustrated work is considered one of the most important natural history texts of the medieval Islamic world.

Shiohi no tsuto - Gifts of the ebb tide

Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts of the ebb tide)
The shell book. (1789)

Painted by Kitagawa Utamaro (?-1806),
edited by Akera Kanko (1738-98)

A colored picture book of Kyoka (satirical poems) about shell collecting. 

Detail

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves

An artist whose name has been lost to time painted the gold-studded illuminations around 1440 in a book of prayers for Catherine of Cleves, a Dutch countess. Her court commissioned the volume of hours, or illustrated daily devotions, around the time she separated from her spendthrift husband, Arnold of Egmond, and began a futile 30-year effort to unseat him. Catherine’s illustrator is most famous for weirdly fanciful borders; he surrounded Latin text blocks with bee swarms, devils, birdcages, pearls, pea pods, burst-open mussels and fish eating one another’s tails. (source)

Detail