JF Ptak Science Books

Blank and Empty Things: Disembodied Celestial Hands and Arms, Part 3.

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This wonderful and dimly provocative image from Johann Siebacher's Wasserstein der Weisen, oder chymisches Tractaetlein.... *, a curious alchemy book of obscured pubom Johann Ambrosius  Siebmacher'lishing heritage, printed around 1660, is a sort of standard celestially-disembodied standard, though in this case the torch-holding hand may be coming through a trinitarian window/hole in the sky, straight from the body of the Der Herr Gott.  Or perhaps not: perhaps this is an illustration of alchemical genius emerging from a Biblical interruption in the sky, igniting a heart-held philosopher's stone fixed to a well-rooted sepulchre, the very tree of life.  The religiously-robed folks are retreating into the deeper shadow without the sight of the gloriously-enlightened lump, plainly visible to the plain observer.  

Or not.  Siebacher uses an epigram at the end of his book calling the whole chymical art into question:  "It is an easy matter to prepare gold in the furnace out of metals: at times there is found a man to whom the secret is revealed. Why is not every alchemist rich? The reason is that one thing is wanting which many seek with anxious care. Common gold is not fixed, and, when brought to the test of fire, quickly disappears and perishes. But he who knows the tired gold, which at all times remains the same, and from which nothing is lost, he is the possessor of the true Art, and may be called a good and practical Sage and Chemist." Rich in vision, and in spirit, with holes in the pockets.

*Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher. Wasserstein der Weysen, das ist, ein chymisch Tractätlein, darin der Weg gezeiget, die Materia genennet, und der Process beschrieben wird, zu dem hohen geheymnuss der Universal Tinctur zukommen, vor diesem niemalen gesehen. Darbey auch zwey sehr nutzliche andere Büchlein der Gleichformigkeit und Concordantz wegen angehenckt, nemlich, 1. Iohan von Mesung. 2. Via veritatis der einigen Warheit..., Frankfurt, 1619, 1661, 1703, 1704, 1709, 1710, 1743, 1762.

Or,

The Sophic Hydrolith; or Water Stone of the Wise, That is, a chymical work, in which the way is shewn, the matter named, and the process described; namely, the method of obtaining the universal tincture. Chapter One:  A BRIEF EXPOSITION OF THE WONDERFUL WATER STONE OF THE WISE, COMMONLY CALLED THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE.

Revolutions in the Color "Red": Paul Gauguin and Edwin Hubble

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A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind.  Emily Dickinson, 1866

Color expresses something by itself.  V. van Gogh

Pure color!  You must sacrifice everything to it…  P. Gauguin

 
Standing in my friends Lucy & Andy Archie’s store, standing near a window and catching some sun on a cold stinking day, a large red jar cast a long red shadow along the wall, causing me to think about the color. (It was a pretty nice shadow.)

Red has turned up as an important color in terms of patriotic/vitriolic symbolism (as in the revolutions of 1848, Garibaldi, communism), Aztec cochinealial luxury,  important burial dress of the Cro-magnums,  signs of divine favor and condemnation, Roman red divine, Egyptian danger, royal cinnabar of China , Indian bridal dresses, Japanese heroic figures, and on and on (into the lower realms of red tape, blood red, fire, blind anger, love/passion, evil, crushing impropriety,  and etc.)

Red’s most important contributions, perhaps, at least in modern times of the past few hundred years or so, comes in the field of art and science—and its appearance really is pretty monumental, and weirdly coincidental in their placement in the chronology of Big Important Stuff.  The birth of impressionism (with Monet and the Salon des Refuses), the greatest change in the history of art since the rediscovery of perspective, and the solidification of spectrum analysis (Bunsen and Kirchhoff), both occurred around the period of 1859-1863—the great use of red for both of these developments would come somewhat later, though the red roots began here. 

The achievement of Bunsen and Kirchhoff, started in the epochal year of 1859 (the same year seeing the publication of the Origin), was nearly as spectacular as any other scientific achievement of that century.  The two men showed—and this would have been incredible to the mind of the 19^th century—that individual atoms had their own spectral signature.  When the Englishman William Huggins absorbed their work, he realized immediately (as did Bunsen and Kirchhoff) that the spectroscope could be turned on the sun and all the rest of it—the results of the experiments of these three revealed the elements of what stars were made of, something that must’ve seemed like science fiction come true.  The second part of the second step* in this fabulous discovery and application came 65 years later, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble** theorized and proved  that the red shift that occur in the spectra of all galaxies actually (a phenomenon which had been observed for years but not understood) meant that they were all racing away (at a speed proportional to their distance, Hubble’s Law) from the Earth—the basis of the Big Bang.  Cosmological significances aside, this was also a big deal for the advancement of color, as it really hadn’t played a very major part at all in the history of science to this point (excepting the brilliant occasional bits like Newton’s Opticks). Color just wasn’t a part of the great systems and ideas of Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Kepler, Newton and so on—it just didn’t come into play. 

 Now, as to the importance of Red in art.  It comes for me with Gauguin.  Gauguin and his red grass.  Red grass doesn’t mean anything today, but in the early 1880’s, well, red grass was, simply, everything.  It was a revolutionary idea to make the idea of what grass”is” subject to the color that the artist thought was demanded by it subject, and that all of this was an artistic variable in the control of each individual interpretation.  It happened right there in the middle of the Impressionist movement, and was the beginning of the end for representational art, the final blow to which would not occur until 1911 with Mr. Kandinsky.

 

This was a lot to blow through in under a thousand words, and undoubtedly I’ve slandered several good ideas—but I think overall that this is a reasonable idea, this importance of the color RED.  There’s much more to be said about the Impressionists and a whole bunch more on the absence of color in the history of science, but that’ll have to come later. 

Of no importance but of some smiling interest is the notion that the paintings that were rejected for exhibition in juried salons (in France in the 1860’s) and which were used in a new movement and in new “juried” shows called Salon des Refuses, were all stamped with an “R” on the back of their canvases.

 _______

*the first great advancement coming in the solving of the so-called “ultraviolet catastrophe”, arriving through the Maxwell equations of 1873 and riding into the quanta of Planck in 1899/1900 (and then to quantum mechanics).

**Hubble, Edwin, "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae" (1929) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of

America

, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173

Return to the Poem-amatic: Tristan Tzara's Dadaist Poetry Engine

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Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.
--Rene Magritte

I am very fond of images like this--images that show us  everything and nothing. The engraving was meant to show some of the ephemeral antique bric-a-brac collected by whatever collector was currently residing at Chantilly.  Remove that explanation, and the meaning of the engraving goes spinning into whatever space you open for it.  It is a wonderful thing to open these dis-associated image combinatorics to free interpretation, each viewer finding their own meaning in a mysteriously composed components. 

This of course was an unintentional artifact of the artist and engraver.  Images like this--confusing, anti-intuitive, misleading--weren't constructed to be so (at least not in a major and determined way) until the arrival of the Dadaists in the 20th century.   This was a short-lived, proto-archaic (?) group with a confusing history, a tumultuous existence, and a short and sure ending.  They were disengaging from the avant garde to form a group that went somewhat beyond*

(Even the naming of the group is a story of unusual ripeness and spoilage, no one being able to tell the truth of how it came into being.  Suffice to say that "dada" either was or wasn't found by an accidental grazing through Larousse by Tristan Tzara in February 1916.  At least Hans Arp tells this as the true story, saying too that he was there, along with his 12 children and a brioche in his left nostril. Anyway the naming doesn't seem to matter terribly much to a group like this that disposed of and twisted names proper and otherwise.)

An example of a Dadaist work is at right, by Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919)

The Dadaists, born in the Cafe Voltaire, were interested first in the written arts, and didn't move to painting and the plastics for a couple of years.  The first among these creative equals was probably Tristan Tzara  (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro, 1896–1963) who was first a writer and poet before an artist.  True to the Dadaist great non-existent history, Tzara set forth a method of constructing poetry.  It was basically an engine for a simultaneous poem, as in the "bruitist" Futurists tradition, which built upon the work of Hugo Ball, who in turn was the inventor of the sound poem (Lautgedicht). And so tongue deep in cheek, Tzara set forth these principles:

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

(Some few weeks ago I made a post about an automatic poem-making device--the poem-amatic fist micrroscope--a fun little bit about making poems of ordinary printed pages by recording what you saw of them in the visual field seen through the barrel of a semi-closed fist. 
Then there is the entry “Poetry from Found-Wordist and Book Pathologist Mr. Ignatio Norme, Found-Wordist and Page Number Collector (Boston, Mass.; 1923-1988))” in my growing and imaginary museum catalog called Weltin and Wantin.  Mr. Norme constructed poems in much this same way, except that he stripped his poems out of the lines of his books. His effort is here, called Primo VI, the Analysis of Man//Fantasies brillantes (by  “the man who found obscure phi-related connectivity between random word placement, page number and the poetic ideal”).

Now.
I tried this out, but not with newspaper--rather I did it with Tzara's instruction itself, and let me tell you, it doesn't work.  There's just too much left to chance, and, frankly, too many prepositions, too much grunting work.

On the other hand, if you lay out the pieces before you and determine to allow yourself 15 minutes to select a poem from the scattered bits on the table, then the method does stand some sort of chance.
Here's what I came up with, and it is almost something or other; at least I think that  is probably not nothing.  In the very least, though, it is a very interesting exercise, trying to get your mind to find a poem in strips of paper.  In that way Mr. Tzara was perfectly correct. 

(Below is a fragment of Mr. Norme's work.)

_______

*  Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
—Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation

Inside-Out Privacy: Hermits, St. Simeon, and Cellular Phones

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"Language is just no damned good."--Marcel Duchamp

It seems to me that when cellular telephones first appeared, they were to deliver a certain amount of privilege, a promise of speed in communication that would allow for more personal time and privacy.  But that was many years ago, back when paying for cable television meant no commercials.  The promise, or possibility, of privacy as a result of using this Ponzi scheme of constant data streaming is a demolished and smoldering pile, missing the smolder and the pile.  There's just nothing in that smoking promise-hole:  no smoke, and not even a hole. 

What it is, I think, is privacy turned inside out:  everything on the inside is now on the outside, a great big visible and vocal outside. 

Privacy, which means to me the promise of some time in which to do a little thinking, is much more in line, say, with the pursuit of a personal space:  not necessarily like that of the beautiful hermit in the image to the left here, but it at least represents the possibility of quiet, which represents a possibility of order and image-making, which in turn represents dreaming or thought or perhaps nothing at all.  It does mean something to the lead monk in this engraving, which belongs to the beautiful Illustrium Anachoretarum Elogia sive religiosi Viri Musaeum ("The Museum of Hermits") of Giacomo Cavaccio (published in Venice in 1625).  This is a beautiful and remarkable book, with 32 full-page engravings punctuating 150 pages of text  surveying the literature and imagery of, yes, hermits.  Although living very simply, these hermits were all in order, living cleanly, with an impressive two-dozen or more books in their little huts.  St. Anthony, another very quiet thinker, lived in a similar fashion but without books and whose story was unknown until it came (post mortem by thirty years) to St. Augustine, appearing in his Confessions.

On the other hand, in the history of quiet asceticism (athletae Dei, "athlete of god"),a hermit without the need of a hermitage, or quiet, or aloneness, a hermit who turned the concept of private thought inside out, was St. Simeon Stylites.  I'm sorry to say that he sounded to me like a person in desperate need to be seen being thoughtful and to display his quiet and dedication loudly.  Chained to an ever-heightening pillar, doing sit ups and reciting his conversations with the creator of the universe, Simeon made it into heaven as a saint after treading the earth as one.  Still he seems to have been the opposite of the expected.

I wonder about this legacy of the invasion of the cell phone; I have little doubt that it is just the barest blink of future invasions of privacy to come, unstoppable and ultimately unwantable. M. Duchamp did say this about words--though he was talking about written and spoken, words--once they left the privacy of the brain, their meanings got all messed up. The interruption of privacy was what corrupted them and their meaning. ("I use it  (language) because I have to" Duchamp said.)  

I can't help but think about the speed of deliverables in the Brave New World.  It reminds me of an observation made by Mikhail Matyushin, in 1915: "Only motion cystallizes outward appearance into a single whole...a speeding train fuses the separatness of the cars into a compact mass..."  He goes on to say that "when at last we shall rush rapidly past objectness we shall probably see the totality of the whole world", though I think that he got that part of it backwards, or perhaps inside out. 

Music, Math, and the Mathematical Piano: Pascal, 1645

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Music is the pleasure of the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. - Gottfried Leibniz

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), physicist and mathematician--rather, mathematician and physicist--and philosopher as well, invented the second mechanical calculator in 1645 (after that of Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) in 1623).  He had a phenomenal output in many different, difficult, and complex areas, all completed before he died at the improbable age of 39. (His predecessor in invention, Schickard, was dead at 43.)   We see him here, seated in front of his beautiful invention (called the Arithemtique, and the Pacalina), looking to be quite a bit older than his age at invention, which was 23.  He looked pretty content with himself, even though, I think, he didn't care all that much for the machine--at least he didn't care enough about it to perfect it, or to try to make real money on the thing.  But the picture of him here always looked to me as though he was playing an enharmomic harpsichord, or using some sort of musical instrument, or doing something more socially beautiful than the optical doing of arithmetic, though both were exhibitions of tuning the polyphonic sub-mysteries harmonies of nature.  His image seems to wed the millennial Pythagorian creation of the music of the spheres, and Leibniz’ scorn of Newton’s occult-y causes of nature’s phenomena, and of Augustine’s “distraction” of perfect creation—a polychord romance of science and music.

Or, maybe, it was just a guy sitting behind a calculator.

Crowds #5: Clarity and Confusion in Displays of Human Masses.

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I do enjoy looking at pictures of crowds--big crowds.  Images of the crowd are much easier to find in the 19th century and onwards (and particularly in photographs), though big displays of human seas (such as they were) began to show up in the late 15th century, and then, more as a matter of course, in the early 16th century.  What is enjoyable for me are the numerous vignettes that make up the whole, discrete visions within the larger visual field, a sweep of smallnesses that can seemingly stand on their own had they been bigger. 

Depicting crowds can be a chore successful and not--for example, the image to the left, an amalgamated porridge of controlled mock combat, a sweeping chaos with appreciative bystanders, is so busy, and has so many constituent parts, that there 

really isn't a "whole".  I can hardly see the thing, for crying out loud, for all of the disconnected action.  The artist who produced this remarkably good/bad image for Georg Ruexner's fantastic Anfamg, Ursprung und Herkomen de Thirnirs in Teutscher Nation (published in 1530) clearly had interest only in the details of the action; and thus the overall image is a beautiful confusion of starts and fits, defiant in its general appeal to comprehension.  The impression to me is a miserably layered oneness of discordant activity, a sloppy relief of enormous detail, the whole worth far less than the sum of its parts. 
The only place that your eye gets a chance to rest and focus is on the two dozen or so spectators who are in the windows and balconies overlooking the small square where the tournament was taking place--their appearance, and also that of the small assembly of musicians at center, offer a calming influence to the rest of the picture.
One bit that leaps out at me, though, are the two small boys who seem to be having a fistfight, right there at the bottom-right of the image.  I can tell you that pictures of boys fighting finding their way into piece of renaissance art is a very rare thing.  Perhaps the artist was trying to send us a message, after all?

(I know this is a pretty big complaint, particularly since the book is a monumental work on The Tournament, and it was done within the first 65 years or so of the invention of movable type printing, but I just found the thing so opitcally  corrosive that I wanted to surface it. )

The second example, coming to us from Antonio Mongitore (L'Atto Pubblico di Fede Solennemente Celebrato nella citta di Palermo, 1724) depicts an earlier scene, and one of complexity and order.  Unfortunately, the cohesion centers around the execution of two tried/convicted heretics--god knows what they did to deserve this cleansing sentence. It didn't take all that much during the Inquisition to find yourself in deep black waters, as Mother Church seems to have been extraordinarily thin-skinned; the slightest abrasion to their slight slate of moral indignities could result in being hurt in foul way, and then burned alive at the stake. 

But in looking closer at this image, I'm not sure sure that these two unfortunates were actually being burnt--it may be that they were being roasted alive.

They are seated, and the pyre seems to be only behind them--perhaps the flames hadn't reached them yet; but people were in fact roasted, cooked alive, which may be even more girzzly than being consumed entirely by flames.  The two are being approached, or watched, or offered too-late benedictions by a line of clerics shielded by a crucifix--perhaps they were just reminding the condemned exactly who it was that they had pissed off. 

There is no doubt that this was a popular diversion for those not in fear of being burnt at the stake, as there are probably hundreds of people in attendance, including those in a semi-circle of pre-modern "skybox" accommodations--undoubtedly the holier folks.  Piety of witnessing best in privacy and all that. 

A Beautiful Book of Terrible Things: Artillery, 1623

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Praxis Artolleriae Pyrotechnicae, printed in Osnabruck by Tilman Buchholtz for Johann Georg Schwaender, is one of those beautiful books of horrible things; beautifully designed and illustrated, with magnificent images of the horrifying necessaries that bind and tear nations and people.  Flying and land-based weapons o fall sorts filled these pages:  rocket, grenades, land mines, plus pyrotechnics and fireworks.  As jolly as this implement might seem, it is not a firework, at least not one for entertainment:  it was meant to dismember or kill.  Those "arrows" on the ring are not showing the direction of the flight of the module--they are spears.  This was a lethal weapon of the highest order--pretty, not-so-simple, and deadly.

Some other beautiful terribles, published to about the year 1600, include: 

Roberto VALTURIO 1472 Vérone De re militari

Niccolo Fontana TARTAGLIA  1537  La Nova Scientia

Vanoccio BIRINGUCCIO  1540 : De La Pirotechnia

Conrad HAAS  1556 : Kunstbuch

Girolamo CATANEO 1564 : Opera nuova di fortificare, offendere et difendere, et far gli alloggiamenti campali.

Thomas DIGGES  1579 Arithmetical military treatise.

Gabriello BUSCA 1584 Istruzione dei Bombardieri.   1585  Della espugnatione et difesa delle fortezze.  1606 :Della Architeltura militare.  

Luys COLLADO 1586 Practica manuale di artegliera.

Jean BEAVIE 1591 Liège La pyrotechnie militaire

Daniel DAVELOURT  1597 Briefve Instructions Sur Le Fait De L'artillerie de France.
- 1606  L’Artillier.
- 1608 : L'Arsenal et le magasin d'artillerie.
- 1617  L'Art et la conduite des eaux sur le fait de l'Artillerie de  et ses dépendances

Joseph BOILLOT.  1598 Modelles, artifices de feu et divers instrumens de guerre 

Gabriele BUSCA da Milano 1605 Della espugnatione et difesa delle fortezze.
1598 Istruttione de' bombardieri.  

Eugenio GENTILINI  1598 Instruttione di artglieri.

David RIVAULT de FLURENCE 1605 Les elemens de l’artillerie concernans tant la theorie que la pratique du canon.
1608 L’invention description & demonstration d’une nouvelle artillerie qui ne se charge que d’air ou d’eau pure, & à neantmoins une incroiable force. Plus d’une nouvelle facon de pouldre a canon tres-violente qui se faict d’or, par un excellent & rare artifice non communiqué jusques à present. L’histoire du progrez & des premiers usages des armes à feu tant recentes qu’anciennes, est deduitte en l’avant-propos.  

Leonhard ZUBLER 1608  Nova geometrica pyrobolia - Neuwe geometrische Büchsenmeisterery.

The Staggering Beauty of Barber Shops: Naive Surreal Department #22

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If I didn't already go to see Korean War Vet Mr. Jack for my (one) hair cut (and I really don't mean "haircut"), I think that I could tear myself away from that wonderful experience to go back into time's recent ankle-deep depths and go to this barbershop....or rather barber emporium.  The location or credit wasn't given in the occupational pamphlet (The Canadian Census Classification Personal Service:  Barber) in which it appeared, which is altogether too bad.  I cannot recall (can you?) ever seeing such a Busby Berkeley arrangement of barber chairs, centered around a washing station, with clouds (!!) painted on the ceiling.  I would half expect to see Mr. Zero Mostel (oh well, not every did well at HUAC) lead them all in a dance routine where everyone finishes up very leggy and in a pool.  It may well be the case in this unnamed palace that we are seeing only half of the shop--evidence in my copy shows that there is the end of a chair in the foreground, meaning that there could be 15 chairs in there, making it one heck of a busy place, clouds on the ceiling or not.  (The clouds make sense, remembering that most men in 1946 would be going in to see the barber for a shave as he would a cut or trim--and why not look at something attractive when you're on your back and someone is scraping your face with a very sharp tool?  Dentists should take heed...) 

And while we're at it, when exactly did womens beauty salons start to appear in earnest?  This pamphet states "But in 1913, when women took to "bobbed" hair, the barbers found a vast new market for their services.  In the last twenty-five years however a large part of this market has been lost to the hairdressers and beauty culture speciaists, most of whom are women."  That would mean that--at least in Canada--men were doing this new "bobbed" styling  for their "vast" new clienetelle from 1913 to 1921. It would've been a very wide and languid hayride for barbers for those years, cutting the hair of both men and women.  I can imagine the shock of the first male barber seeing the first woman-operated beauty salon swing open its no-males doors--probably there on his street--and hear that glug glug glug sound of business being drained.  Bobbed hair giveth, and bobbed hair taketh away.  

And now, speaking completely through my hat, I wonder about where women got their hair cut in the 19th century.  My guess:  they didn't go "out" to have it cut; when they did cut it, they did so at home.  I cannot recall seeing any pre-WWI advertisements for hair cutting for women--as a matter of fact the overwhelming memory I have of women and hair going back into the mid 19th century is for hair care products showing women with enormously long hair adding balms and salves and lustreizers and so forth to it.  I can't force a memory of an ad for anything having to do with cutting womens' hair--not even an ad for shears.  Of course a very low percentage of women were in the workforce before WWI, and the women who were wealthier and could afford evening clothing could certainly afford to have someone come over and take care of their hair. Slipping back into the 18th century and slightly before, there was the issue of wigs and extenders--or whatever it was that society women would add to their hair to make it impossibly tall and full.  But that was a very restrictive percentage of women enjoying that privelege, and I'm not sure that it counts for my purposes here.

My guess is that the money just wasn't there.  Or it wasn't there until women sorta started to work, and there was a shortish hairstyle that was not too complicated or time consuming to cut.   Again, I'm just guessing all of this out, but it does seem to make sense.  

Van Helmont's Lovely Title Page and his Sorry Slip into Curative Magnetism

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Joan Baptiste van Helmont's A ternary of paradoxes : the magnetick cure of wounds, nativity of tartar in wine, image of God in man.
(printed in London  by James Flesher for William Lee, 1650), offers its own unintended paradoxes (and joined the field of relatively few books with the word "paradox" in their title).  Purportedly a work of science, van Helmont offers the reader his views on the curative powers of the loadstone.  Of particular interest is Helmont's (1579-1644) discussion of the weapon salve, a cure for injuries caused by knives and swords. The unique feature of this ointment was that it was not applied to the wound but to the weapon which caused the wound, though in the midst of other very problematic scientific observations, this wasn't so bad.  For example, Helmont presented a recipe for making scorpions, which involved bricks, sunlight and basil, from which a scorpion would come. 

And what exactly is Helmont's place in the history of science?  Difficult to say:  he did make several important physical discoveries, and did present what some have called the modern approach to experimentation (firm insistence on relateable objects in empirical observation and so on); however, he was a reaching alchemist misty mystic who rejected syllogistic thought, mathematics*, human reasoning.  These are hard bits to let go.

All this said, what with scorpions and magnetic treatment of wounds, he comes close to the generation of infection in wounds:  "Upon the solution of Unity in any part the ambient air...repleted with various

evaporations or aporrhoeas of mixt bodies, especially such as are then suffering the act of putrefaction, violently invadeth the part and thereupon impresseth an exotic miasm or noxious diathesis, which disposeth the blood successively arriving at the wound, to putrefaction, by the intervention of fermentation. " With his magnetic sympathy, Van Helmont expressed clearly the doctrine of immunity and the cure of disease by immune sera: "For he who has once recovered from that disease hath not only obtained a pure balsaamical blood, whereby for the future he is rendered free from any recidivation of the same evil, but also infallibly cures the same affection in his neighbour...and by the mysterious power of Magnetism transplants that balsaam and conserving quality into the blood of...'
Problematic greatness just needs to be understood in greater detail than simply disregarding everything because someone disdains logic...

Note:

The interesting image in the middle of the title page is more religious symbolism than what seems to be a straightforward physics reference, and the bulk of it lies in the "lumen de lumine" inference, which in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses faith in Jesus Christ as Lumen de Lumine (Light from Light).  Once you replace the optics with the divine, the rest of the image and its relationship to the contetns of the obok becomes more clear.

* Helmont thought about the restrictiveness of mathematics, and that the quantitative aspects of things that math addressed missed their interior qualities, thus making mathematics not able to see what things are.  Oopsie.

The Discovery of Nothing: Things out of Place Deparment #4 AND a History of Blank and Empty Things #32

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This is really just another bit of fun--the four objects in the sky weren't unrelated to the scene, not at all, though if you wanted you could certainly create a fantastically rigorous and bizarre story for them; they certainly did define the concept of "nothing" for the Blank & Empty Things thread of this blog.  here is no doubt that the image has a very quiet, possibly Dadist origin.  In fact, this is one illustration from one of the greatest experimental physics books of the 17th century, coming as it does from Otto von Guericke's  Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio (Amsterdam, 1672).  In another minute department, this one is also I guess the greatest book ever written by a Mayor of anywhere (as von Guericke (1602-1886) was mayor of

Magedeburg for 33 years).  The image shows the greatest of von Guericke's efforts, and one of the greatest (or most important) experiments in experimental science--the dramatic demonstration of the vacuum, showing here that teams of horses could not pull apart two halves of an evacuated sphere, and of course the efficacy of air pressure operating against it (um, the vacuum). The "floating" bits in the sky were an exploded view of the sphere that was the subject of the experiment. 

What was more important though, and what the general reader today might easily miss, was that von Guericke created something that many scientists and philosophers said didn't, and couldn't, exist:  the vacuum.  In modern times, Copernicus depicted the universe as a vast void; Descartes came in the back door (following the ancient and interesting though incorrect theory of Aristotle*), not liking the idea very much, and claiming that such empty space couldn't exist.  Von Guericke provided the proof that the vacuum, that nothing, did exist. 

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*Aristotle (384-322 BCE) theorized that as air became thinner objects moving through it would move faster, which is true; he further speculated that if there was no air at all, that if vacuums did exist, then objects would move infinitely fast, which he correctly assumed was not possible, and thus the vacuum could not exist. 

Odd Things in the Sky Department: Der Herr Gott in a Cape, and Bombs Away

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What upsets people is not things themselves, but their theories about things.  —Epictetus, quoted in the epigraph to Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)

Continuing a minor thread on "Odd Things in the Sky", which also joins up nicely with another odd thread, "Things Out of Place",  come these two interesting, just-remembered images, showing a stiff-armed god and a big old bomb coming out of the sky.  The first, left, is the title page of the Strassburg-born army surgeon  Hieronymus Brunschwig's Apoteck fuer den Gmeine man der die Ertzet.  Published posthumously in 1530, the good dead doctor offers wide and varied instructions and ruminations on medicine (per se) and health care to the average person--meaning, basically, the person with enough money to buy a book but who could not afford a doctor (probably a slim margin).  the book was filled with reasoned and reasonable approaches to taking care of health and illness, with cures and recipes for everything from itchyness to syphilis.  Presumably the Der Herr Gott of Einstein is doing a little more than throwing dice, taking a very prescribed interest in the hoeing man and gathering woman.  It is interesting to see that the man emerging from the cloud, somehow needs a cape. 

Coming from the sky next is a bomb, the creation of  Francois Blondel, (1618-1686) in his L'art de jetter les bombes…, published 1699.  Blondel was as good in building as he was in un-building, being in charge of the public works of Paris (and appointed so by Louis XIV, being perhaps one of the most important architectural/engineering positions that could be imagined by the French mind), as well as being an expert in the construction of forts and fortifications.  His work on bombs and artillery was ready to be published 15 years or so before 1699, but the King saw that even though there was a lot of interest and use to his military in seeing the treatise published, the same was also true of his enemies.

But of interest to me here is the title page and the bomb not only falling from the sky, but  falling from the bannered heavens.  There's nothing soft or spooky about the book itself, which is all business, of course, as important to the military man of 1700 as, say, Robert Coles' book on underwater explosions was in 1965 or Urbanski's Chemistry of Explosives a decade earlier.  And even though Blondel certainly built on Galileo's work on the parabolic flight of such weapons, the bomb on the front cover is falling straight down. 

Things out of Place Department: a Cloud of Magnetism in the Sky Poked by the Needle of God

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"And even though I'm sitting waiting for Mars
I don't believe there's any future in cause
Hole in the sky, gate way to heaven
Window in time, through it I fly..."

Black Sabbath, "Hole in the Sky", 1975

Well, there were many liberties taken with this title, though on the face of it, the title is correct (sort of).   This image comes from a relatively obscure (or at least quite rare) copy of  Joachim Dalance's work Traite de l'Aiman, divise en deux parties, la premiere continent les Experiences et la seconde les raisons que l'on en peut rendre... which was printed by Henry Weinstein in Amsterdam in 1687 (just across the waters in London Isaac Newton's fantabulous Prinmcipa Mathemtica was being printed in the same year).    This important work on magnetism featured a number of good and useful observations on magnetism, interspersed with some semi-useless bits:  the magnetically floated coffin of Mohamets is mentioned and disproved, the origin of magnetism is asserted by hypothesis and is not pretty, along with some "fanciful conception(s) of the magnet's potential"*; on the other hand, there is a mention of the invention of the compass, the real use of magnets, a mention of declination, and the orientation of a compass needle in a magnetic field is shown.  All pretty good stuff, considering the time.  (The magnum opus on the magnet was published in 1600m by William Gilbert and was called De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth), though folks have been writing on magnetism since Aristotle and Thales)

M. Hofer, the author of the quote above, mentions that the pamphlet's images "are particularly good scientific illustrations", though doesn't mention this, figure 2, as being anything significant.  Trying to dissect the phenomenal imagery, which purports to depict the origins of the sources of magnetism, we see something like a "magnetic cloud" in the sky, about to be pricked by a needle held by the primum mobile.  That, or it is a missing piece of sky, a gapping hole, though not in the sense of what we're getting now in the ozone layer, or in the fantastic billion-light-year wide swath of nothingness in the foamy universe.  Perhaps it is more like the Black Sabbath lyrics after all, a hole in the sky, pricked by the creator, to loosen the fabric of magnetism and getting a glimpse of heaven.    Or something.  

[I should point out that Dalance was an out-and-about guy, with high-level correspondence, and who seemed to be at the right places at the right time.  Among many contributions to the sciences, Dalance--who was a friend of Henry Oldenbourg, helped introduce Huygens to the Royal Society as well as to the French Academy of Sciences, acting as an intermediary for the most part.  He seems to be an interesting guy.]

*--Ph. Hofer, Baroque Book Illustration, page 42

Rare and Possibly Unique Presentation Department: Dead Murdered Brothers and the (Second) War of the Three Henries

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I'm not sure where this image falls in the classifying scheme of this blog--I knew that I had to save it before it disappeared into the memory hole, lost forever.  These are a remarkable, a pair of full-page images depicting the murder of two brothers, two famous brothers, in very much the same way.  They appear in a popular pamphlet written by "Ligue" (Jean Boucher) called La Vie et faits Notables de Henry de Valois... which is innocuous enough as a starting title, then gets peppered up quite a bit, continuing ou sont contenues les trahisons...et hontes de cest Hypocrite, Apostat, ennemy de la relgion Catholique, which was pretty strong stuff uttered against a former monarch, Henry III (1551-1589), and which was published in the year of the king's death. .  Boucher intended to lance the king, and did so very successfully, his small pamphlet outlining and cataloging the various shames and travesties of the problematic Henry reaching at least six editions.   The two images here are victims of Henry:  the first is Henry de Guise, who was murdered in Blois on 23 December 1588; the second is of his brother, the Cardinal de Guise, who was murdered the previous day, invited as they were to visit with the king at his palace.

Their murders was one of the final acts of the final bit of the last of the religious wars in France:  this was part of the closing curtains of the War of the Three Henrys (1584-1589), involving Henry III of France (Catholic), Henry of Navarre, eventually Henry IV of France (Protestant), and Henry of Guise (Catholic)). This confusing bit is not to be confused with an earlier war of Henrys, the War of the Three Henries (977-978).  Henry and his Cardinal brother were put down under direct royal order by the Forty-five, (a hit team operating exclusively at the please of Henry III, 15 of which were always attending the person of the King) for his mis-allegiance to the monarch. The war would come toppling down with  King Henry's own assassination in the next year,  put down by a blade to the belly by a Franciscan.

The two brothers were exhibited in their last states in adjoining woodcuts in the Boucher pamphlet, comparing their cuts side-by-side...I cannot remember seeing such an image like this before.

Things out of Place Department: the Moon

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 This is a short entry in the “Things out of Place” department.  The image is lovely enough, and the depiction of the Moon is excellent, especially given the time of publication, which was 1683.  The Moon though, of course, is enormously out of proportion with the setting—I’m not sure why it needed a setting at all, but it has one, and it is odd.  The work is that of the prolific Manesson Mallet, who published this engraving as one of 677 in his massive Description de l’Univers, which appeared in five volumes.  I’m also not sure of how Mallet came to such greatness and capacity, as he started out his life (1630-1706) as a simple foot soldier under Louis XV, rising and rising in promotion and ability over the years until he became the chief inspector of forts.  He also wrote military books, including the three volume Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre (1684), which he was somehow able to accomplish in the year after publishing his magnum opus.

I really couldn't figure out where to put his image, categorically speaking that is--it sort of fits into the small Extra Earth series, simply because the extra earths are big and way out of proportion.  But this is not "extra", and not the earth, but it is out of proportion and belongs in the sky; and, taken out of context, the image is very unusual, in a naive surreal kind of way...

Blank and Missing Things #31: Missing Earth

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In 1830 when Amos Eaton, filling up his chair and burning the  midnight oils in his home in Albany New York, was figuring out the insides of the earth  He had but little direct evidence to go on, and the publications on the topic of the center of the earth were left to speculation not much better then than science fiction (a term which had not been invented yet; neither for that matter had the word "scientist").   A  very careful  observer, Eaton applied what he knew about the strata of the earth to a theory of how the landforms of the upper/outer mantle were formed. (Eaton (1776-1842) was as influential a teacher as he was a theorist and observer:  some of his students include the following Big Names (for which many buildings on university grounds are named for ):  James Dwight Dana   (geologist, zoologist), James Eights  (Antarctic explorer), Asa Gray ( greatest 19^th c American botanist), James Hall  (first New York State Geologist), Joseph Henry (developed electromagnetism, all-around smart guy who communicated with everyone, secretary of the Smithsonian and so on.)

He applied the discoveries of stratum of William Smith (1759-1839, the "father of English Geology") drawing on a number of maps of his, such as “Strata Identified by Organized Fossils. : Containing Prints on Coloured Paper of the Most Characteristic Specimens in each Stratum” of 1815  and “Geological section from London to Snowdon; showing the varieties of the strata, and the correct altitude of the hills” of 1815 (pictured below), plus much else.  

These two images (left) of cross-sections of the earth appeared in Eaton's Geological Textbook, (1830). The top shows the earth in perfect harmony and in cross-section, depicting the strata in six layers beneath a calm and palcid ocean.  There was trouble though located inside the six bulbous bulbs on the interior of the innermost strata:  as we see in the second image, the six bulbs, filled with
"combustible material", combusted, forming volcanoes and such, thereby parting the waters and forming the continents. It was some pretty  good thinking for the time.  But what attracted me to these images was the labeling of the interior of the newly-exploded earth, "interior probably undisturbed", and blank beyond that point.  a dark, blackish mass, unknown and from where Eaton sat, unknowable.  But Eaton did do an extraordinary job in trying to imagine this stuff, piecing things together from the geological record in those pre-Darwin, pre-Lyell days.  The woodcut at right appeared in the same publication as that above--this incredible rendering depicts the entirety of  North America  in profile, which was a vast leap of faith, an image so severe in its accomplishment that it is difficult today to realize how shocking it must've seemed to the readers of 1830.  I believe this was the first time a true geological cross-section like this was attempted--again to see an X-ray (pre-dating that discovery by 65 years by the way) of the earth and to have it be not so terribly bad (compared to today) was just a phenomenal achievement

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Just for the record, Smith's map of the London area--which presages the Eaton map somewhat--appears below: