The paper aims to investigate the role of images and plates in European natural sciences journals of the first half of 19th century. Visual practices played a central role for naturalists in the process of knowledge-making, explaining and communicating nature to an audience of scientists, amateurs, academics and intellectuals. The end of 18th century and the early 19th century was a period of relevant growth for zoology, botany, geology and paleontology, a time in which new discoveries and new theories entered the arena of ideas, before the ascension of Darwin's evolutionism in the second half of the century: thus, it is important to understand in which way naturalists used images and how they considered them, since they were an integral part of the tools displayed in scientific articles to argue and convince the scientific community.
Naturalists didn’t use only descriptions and observations, but also representations, drawings, lithographs or engravings considered as specific and stratified scientific data as the text. Often they presented in their papers images taken from other authors' articles or books to explain their theories, other times they realized special plates to synthesize their descriptions. Therefore, studying the circulation and diffusion of some of these images means to draw a visual history of natural sciences in an age of great expansion. The paper will consider examples taken from learned journals of the end of 18th century and the first half of 19th century such as the French «Annales des Sciences Naturelles», the Italian «Memorie della Reale Accademia delle scienze di Torino», or the English «Annals and Magazine of Natural History».