so that she could present it to the queen of England. She mused "It is reasonable for a woman to make such a gift to a person of the same sex". But nothing came of the plan. Metamorphosis and the tropical ants Merian documented were cited by the scientists René Antoine, August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, Mark Catesby and George Edwards. Merian's Metamorphosis has been credited with influencing a range of naturalist illustrators. Merian also documented the medicinal use of plants and animals by the people of Suriname. She documented among others that the sap from a palm was used rubbed into itchy scalps to treat worm infections. Merian also took an interest in agriculture and among the local fruit she showcased was the pineapple. When describing the pineapple Merian cited several standard works on natural history, which first had documented the fruit, such as Historia Naturalis Brasilae by Willem Piso and Georg Marggraf, Hortus Malabaricus by Hendrik van Rheede, and Medici Amstelodamensis by Caspar Commelin. While the pineapple had been drawn before, Merian's became the most prominent. She provided information on how the butterflies and cockroaches affected crops and agriculture in the colony. While documenting the botany of Suriname, Merian continued to record the metamorphosis of insects. Suriname's insects were shown throughout their entire life cycle and on their plant host. A significant number of Merian's paintings combining a plant, caterpillar and butterfly are simply decorative, and make no attempt to describe the life cycle. For instance, the Gulf fritillary is shown with a vanilla plant, an orchid from the Americas, which is definitely not the host plant, and with the caterpillar of some other species. This problem recurs in many of her illustrations. An attempt to identify the insects and plants in a recent facsimile edition of her Suriname book was able to determine a number of species, although Merien usually gets the food plants wrong, makes numerous mistakes in depicting the morphology, and usually pairs the wrong species of caterpillar with its imago. Her drawings are part of the scientific exploration by Europeans. Early taxonomy of tropical plants relied on images or specimens. Following her return to Amsterdam the images she had made were used by Carl Linnaeus and others to identify one hundred or so new species. At the time there was no standardised scientific terminology to name plants and animals, so Merian used common everyday