The archive reading. An original interpretation of the source plate, not a reproduction of it.
ENTITY 0708
The Fourth Instar
A developmental stage with a pair of limbs that neither the stage before nor the stage after possesses.
- Held by
- not deployed
- On the floor
- not deployed
- Material House
- not deployed
- Chain
- Anvil (local) · not live
Entity Record: original fiction
Written for this project in response to the historical record below. It is not a historical claim and is never presented as one.
The plate is otherwise exemplary: five stages, correctly ordered, correctly proportioned, and coloured by a workshop that clearly had the specimens in front of it. The fourth figure is left uncoloured and carries eight limbs where the third and fifth have six. Two centuries of entomology have found no organism that does this. The archive files the fourth instar as an Entity on the simplest available reading: the colourist skipped it because the colourist could not see what to colour.
The Fourth Instar. Intermediate Stage of the Underlayer realm, recorded with a Phosphor aura and a intermittent signal.
Written from
- The medium and date of the source: Hand-coloured copperplate engraving, 1749
- The historical collection it belongs to: Transformation Plates
- What the plate depicts, as described in the record's alt text
Historical Record
UnverifiedVerifiable information derived from the source. Everything here describes a real object and can be checked against the page it came from. Nothing in it is invented, and nothing in it was inferred from what the picture looks like.
- Source page
- not yet sourced
- Original title
- Metamorphosis, tab. XXXI
- Artist
- After M. S. Hoefnagel
- Year
- 1749
- Medium
- Hand-coloured copperplate engraving
- Collection
- Transformation Plates
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark 1.0
- Credit
- Scan hosted by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The contributing library sets the rights statement and must be identified per item before use.
- Associated article
- not linked
Eighteenth-century metamorphosis plates were made from preserved and living material by workshops that were often extremely accurate, and a plate of this quality would have been checked against specimens before publication. Errors happen; errors that survive the check are rarer and worth recording.
This record has not passed verification. Nobody has yet opened the source page, confirmed that the image, artist, year, collection and institution match it, or confirmed that the digital reproduction, not merely the underlying work, is free of restriction. Its crop has also not been reviewed by a person. It is blocked from mint metadata until that happens. See provenance and rights.
Classification: an ENTITY interpretation
Original fiction. An interpretive vocabulary the archive applies to a historical object. No value below is a finding about the world.
- Realm
- Underlayer
- Primary phenomenon
- Becoming
- Anatomical manifestation
- Supernumerary Limb Pair
- Aura
- Phosphor
- Signal
- Intermittent
- Material affinity
- Health
- Material House
- House of Life
Living Record
Onchain state. It changes; the sections above do not.
Dormant
Filed, and nothing more. The record exists; nobody has been to it.
Contacted
Somebody has been to the source and come back with something.
Named
A true name has been established and attested. It is not necessarily the one on the plate.
Remembered
The record has been corroborated a second time, independently.
Manifested
The Entity has a material life: placed in a House and drawing against it.
The archive is not yet on chain, so the current status cannot be shown. Every record still reads in full.
Published at Dormant. That is the genesis value, not the current one.
Curatorial note
One of the Volume VIII records permitted a second historical title. It appears in one later catalogue as tab. XXXI bis.
Metadata integrity
- Record hash
- 0x91b3ebc4010cc8ebbedf50c6d8978fed6c0836016c9596d1838fb91fc954a057
- Token id
- 708 → content/entities/0708.json
- Plate checksums
- Published for every plate
The record hash is the sha256 of the canonical JSON as published. The Progression contract stores the same hash on every advance, so a holder can prove the text they were shown is the text the chain acknowledged.
