Newly hatched spider

Various insects and insect parts appeared in the earliest applications of microscopic photography, especially in France. In March 1839, Samuel Morse famously described Louis Daguerre’s view of a spider magnified by a solar microscope as "a new kingdom to explore." Among the first prints that Alfred Donné made from daguerreotypes and presented to the Académie des Sciences in October of 1839 was a microscopic view of a fly’s eye.
In subsequent years, several French photographers who specialized in microphotographs (including Louis Favre, Hyacinthe Fourtier, and Jean Lachenal) also printed them on transparent glass slides so the images could be projected. The author of these twelve slides is unknown, but the inclusion of a tooth and the lung of a snake demonstrate the wide range of microphotography’s subject matter by the end of the nineteenth century.