The following passage is adapted from an essay on the history of natural history and botanical illustration:
In June 1699, fifty-two-year-old German-born naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian took an unprecedented step for an independent woman of her era: she sold her estate in Amsterdam to self-fund a scientific expedition to South America. Accompanied by her youngest daughter, Dorothea, Merian boarded a ship bound for Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname. At the time, naturalists rarely observed insects in their wild habitats, relying instead on preserved, dried specimens shipped to European cabinets of curiosity. Merian, however, was determined to study living organisms directly, documenting their full life cycles and ecological relationships.
Upon arriving in Suriname later that summer, Merian began conducting intense field study in the dense rainforests surrounding Paramaribo. Over the course of nearly two years, she collected, bred, and painted dozens of native insect species alongside the host plants upon which they fed. Her work shattered contemporary assumptions regarding spontaneous generation by meticulously capturing the metamorphosis of caterpillars into moths and butterflies. However, in the summer of 1701, an unexpected illness—likely malaria—compelled Merian to prematurely terminate her field research and return to Europe to recover.
Back in Amsterdam, Merian spent three years preparing her field sketches and notes for publication. Refusing to rely on third-party publishers who might compromise the scientific fidelity of her copperplate engravings, she personally oversaw every aspect of production. In 1705, she issued her monumental work, *Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium* (*The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname*), financed entirely through a private subscription model she organized herself. The publication set a new standard for scientific illustration by depicting insects together with the specific plant species they inhabited.
Based on the passage, place the following biographical events involving Maria Sibylla Merian in the correct chronological order as they explicitly occurred.
- 1Merian liquidated her property in Amsterdam to finance her travel.
- 2Merian boarded a vessel destined for Paramaribo alongside her daughter Dorothea.
- 3Merian contracted a severe illness that forced her to halt her research in Suriname.
- 4Merian published her major scientific volume *Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium*.