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Cover  This month's cover features artwork by Ernst Haeckel, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, who drew up a comprehensive classification of the forms of living things in his monumental work, Art Forms in Nature. In Haeckel's study of life-forms, he grouped organisms not by their function, but according to their basic pattern of symmetry. This can be clearly seen in the cover picture, which depicts the striking symmetrical pattern of cells comprising several simple-celled organisms, including Hydrodictyaceae and Kokkale algen. Haeckel believed that knowledge of nature can be ascertained by studying its form independently of its underlying cause or mechanism. He grouped organisms according to their complex patterns of symmetry, and he proposed that the rules governing these patterns were acquired through and conserved in the development of individual species. Much of biological science today follows an experimental rather than descriptive agenda. In examining Haeckel's spectacular collection of artwork of life-forms, it becomes clear that we would benefit in our studies by also including a descriptive agenda, in which the complex patterns of form exhibited by living things are used to understand function.Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz