Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (18 page)

—

WHO WOULD READ
such a book? People like John Locke, Benedict Spinoza, Christiaan Huygens, and Edmund Halley, to name a few. Later, people like Cotton Mather, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne. Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, looked forward to its publication for several years, and in 1664 he wrote to Robert Boyle that the volume was soon expected at a London bookseller's. He subsequently paid more for it, fifty shillings, than for any other item in his very substantial library.
Indeed a few years later, when Oldenburg made a list with the heading “Catalogue of my best books and what they cost me,” three of Kircher's titles were included in the first five. It's hard to say exactly what he meant by “best,” though, since
Underground World
presented certain problems.

Oldenburg wrote to Sir Robert Moray about one of the book's claims—that the moon caused the tides not by virtue of gravity but by virtue of a “Nitrous quality.” Kircher had written that he could achieve the effect himself on a small scale. “
Let it be experimented . . .” Oldenburg wrote, “whether Nitrous water, mixed with common salt, exposed in a basin to ye Beams of ye moon in a free open place and a cleere Moonshiny night, will boyle and bubble up.”

Moray admired Kircher, though sometimes he found it difficult to champion him. (Among his comments about
Underground World
: “I do not deny it to be long.”) He was perfectly willing to try the experiment, and studied the prepared bowl of water for the “large part of half an hour,” but observed only a few small air bubbles. Robert Boyle set up a basin of water in the same way; his assistant stayed up two nights watching it, with no detectable result.

“'
Tis an ill Omen, me thinks,” wrote Oldenburg, “yt ye very first Experiment singled out by us of Kircher, failes, and yt 'tis likely, the next will doe so too.”

To understate the case, Oldenburg wasn't the only one who had doubts about aspects of
Underground World
. In Florence, for example, a physician in the Medici court named Francesco Redi had several. When not composing poems such as
Bacchus in Tuscany
, his wine-celebrating dithyramb, Redi dissected animals and performed experiments in the laboratory of the Palazzo Pitti. After an education in Jesuit schools, he had taken to courtly life, and had recently begun wearing the kind of tall wig of ringlets made popular by Louis XIV of France. A leading member of the scientific society established by Grand Duke Ferdinand II, and head of the ducal pharmacy, he was a proponent of the new philosophy and the experimental method.
Redi wasn't completely modern; as a physician, he was just as apt to prescribe plant-derived purges and donkey's milk as the next early modern doctor. But Kircher's section on spontaneous generation struck him as dubious, and he decided to look into the age-old idea for himself.

In his
Esperienze Intorno alla Generazione degl' Insetti
(
Experiments on the Generation of Insects
), published three years later, Redi described a series of close observations involving a variety of rotting animal tissue: “
a large pigeon,” “a sheep's heart,” a “large piece of horseflesh,” “some skinned river frogs.” As expected, maggots appeared. But there was something else. “Almost always I saw that the decaying flesh and the fissures in the boxes where it lay were covered not alone with worms, but with the eggs from which . . . the worms were hatched.” Also a lot of flies were hovering around.

Redi then conducted one of the very first controlled experiments ever documented: “I put a snake, some fish, some eels of Arno, and a slice of milk-fed veal in four large, wide-mouthed flasks; having well closed and sealed them, I then filled the same number of flasks in the same way, only leaving these open.” Maggots soon began to appear on the flesh in the open containers, but not in the closed ones.

He experimented with a number of variations, sometimes covering the flasks with “a fine Naples veil,” but no maggots or worms or anything at all ever appeared inside the covered containers. He also dutifully followed Kircher's instructions for breeding bees in the dung of an ox (“
I don't know whether that estimable author had ever carefully made this experiment, but when I made it . . . I observed no generation of any kind.”); for breeding scorpions in dead scorpions (“
I risked a second and third experiment, only to be disappointed and to wait in vain for the desired young scorpions . . .”); and for breeding flies in dead flies (“
I believe . . . that the aforesaid honey-water only serves to attract the living flies to breed in the corpses of their comrades and to drop eggs therein.”). He never had any luck.

With no insects appearing in closed flasks, Redi was convinced that “
no animal of any kind is ever bred in dead flesh unless there be a previous egg deposit.”

Redi referred to Kircher somewhat patronizingly as “a man of worthy esteem,” but it had never occurred to Kircher to regulate his experiments this way—to put a lid, as it were, on his container. That was really all it took to disprove what Redi called “the dictum of ancients and moderns.” It was as if Redi were making a strangely elegant threat to all long-held assumptions everywhere, while Kircher was trying to reaffirm a conception of the world he sensed was slipping away.

Kircher, who turned sixty-three the year
Underground World
came out, wasn't willing to relinquish a thing. By 1668, when Redi's manuscript for
Experiments on the Generation of Insects
was ready for publication, Kircher had already published
five
more books, on everything from the mystical significance of numbers to the history of the mountain shrine at Mentorella he was restoring (in his free time).

17

Fombom

T
he experimental circumstances in which Kircher allowed a dog to be bitten by a venomous snake came about even before work on
Underground World
was finished.

The snake came in a wooden crate along with other vipers destined for the pharmacy of the Collegio Romano, where, in accordance with centuries-old procedures, their meat would serve as the chief ingredient in a new batch of theriaca, the fermented concoction believed to heal or prevent all kinds of afflictions, especially the bites of snakes. (Theriaca was supposed to work by sympathetic means. Those means might also be described, in Kircherian terms, as magnetic. In modern terms, they might be called homeopathic.) Some recipes called for more than sixty ingredients, including opium, rhubarb, nutmeg, turpentine, St. John's wort, and the yellow secretion from the castor sacs of beavers. Apothecaries liked to age their theriaca on the shelf for a number of years.

The arrival of the vipers represented an opportunity for Kircher to test a medical curiosity. A Bavarian-born Jesuit missionary named Heinrich Roth had recently visited Rome after years at Agra, site of the recently built Taj Mahal, and on the island of Salsete, near Bombay. He'd presented Kircher with three so-called serpent stones, or snake stones. These lightweight items—about the size of a small coin and inconsistently described as reddish, green, or white, with brown or blue around the edges, or black—were said to have been cut from the heads of cobra snakes found in India, China, and Southeast Asia, and to serve as the only antidote to the cobra's bite. (Cobra is short for
cobra de capello
, Portuguese for “snake with a hood.”) When applied to a snakebite, the stone supposedly adhered to the skin, drew out the venom, and fell off when saturated with poison. These little stones or bones were beginning to show up in courts and salons all over Europe. Jesuits presented specimens to the Holy Roman Emperor, and Franciscan missionaries offered a number of samples to the Medici court. The repository of the Royal Society had a stone from “Java Major,” now called Sumatra. There were reports from Jesuits that they worked.

As Kircher described the trial, he gathered a “
multitude of Fathers and other curious men” to observe, and then arranged for the hapless dog and one of the newly arrived vipers, known for the depth and tenacity of their bite, to meet. The viper struck. The snake stone was applied.

“
When this stone was placed on the dog's snake bite, it stuck to the wound so that one could scarcely pull it away, remaining fixed to the wound for a long time,” Kircher reported. “Finally, having drained all the poison, it fell away by itself, like a leech saturated with blood. The dog was free from the poison, and although feverish for a while, was restored to his former health after about a day.”

Kircher included the account in his very popular
China Illustrated
, published in 1667. But there was a problem with this experiment: Kircher may have only
claimed
to conduct it. His rendering of the event is a little too similar to the account of another Jesuit, published in 1656. (
Kircher: “I wouldn't believe this, unless I had done an experiment with a dog who had been bitten by a viper.” Father Michał Boym: “I wouldn't have believed it myself unless I had performed an experiment on a dog.”)

Perhaps because the report came from a fellow Jesuit, there was no real need to conduct that particular test, only to say that he had. Maybe he was just replicating the experiment as meticulously as possible. In whatever trials he did make, he very probably observed a tendency on the part of the snake stone to stick to an open wound. But rather than look into the porosity or absorbency of the unusually lightweight material (if not actually dried organic material, it may have been pumice stone), he saw what he was searching for, and attributed the snake stone's apparent drawing power to magnetism.

To Kircher, this “miraculous magnet of poisons” was a new piece of evidence in a larger argument that deserved more than a mention in his book on China. A public reaffirmation of his magnetic philosophy was in order. As he wrote in the resulting
Magnetic Kingdom of Nature
, also published in 1667, “
I think that the immutable force of nature implanted in particular things which does not proceed from manifest or elemental qualities ought to be called magnetism.”

Whenever invisible forces were at work, he claimed, magnetism was at work. Magnetism is “the same thing which is called occult by some, or the instrument of divine potency by the Hebrews, or the hidden form operating in all things by others; some call it the sympathetic and antipathetic quality. But I believe it should be called magnetism, since in truth all energy existing in things of this kind works according to the analogy of the lodestone, that is, attraction and repulsion.”

A modern academic writes that Kircher “
ignited wide publicity about this wonder and its medical powers” and
became “the leading advocate for the efficacy of the new therapy.” Robert Boyle would conduct trials. Francesco Redi would, too.

—

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER,
Kircher's notoriety grew, and his publishers in Amsterdam had no qualms about trying to capitalize on it.
China Illustrated
, for example, which was in fact copiously illustrated, was meant to feed European curiosity for more reliable information about the culture behind gunpowder, paper, porcelain (or “china”), and the parasol. Was it true, for instance, that Chinese physicians could cure sickness without bloodletting? Readers looked to someone of Kircher's stature to augment their fairly paltry knowledge of China with his patented blend of virtually everything that was interesting and important to understand.

First among these things, as he explained it, was that the lands of the East were originally settled and populated by Egyptians after the Great Flood. Kircher believed the
Egyptian roots of Chinese culture could clearly be seen in its caste system and in its penchant for “mystic temples,” but most obviously in the written language, the hieroglyphics, of the Chinese. The Chinese also honored the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, though they called him Confucius. And they worshipped the Egyptian goddess Isis, only they called her Pussa. (In Japan, Kircher claimed, they worshipped a male version called Fombom.)

The goddess Pussa on a lotus, from
China Illustrated

Drawn primarily from the reports of missionaries who had been traveling to the East since the 1570s,
China Illustrated
didn't limit itself to China. Hence the section on the use of the snake stone, which Kircher attributed primarily to the Brahmans in India. But there was no shortage of fascinating things to note about the Chinese empire itself, which stretched from the tropics to the “
cold and frozen northern zones.” “It is so large that you can't find a more populous nation anywhere on earth,” he reported, estimating the figure to be around two hundred million, “not counting the royal ministers, eunuchs, women, and slaves.”

Interesting creatures of the East included the “fast cow” (the rhinoceros), the “marine horse” (the hippopotamus), and various species of ape, which Kircher noted were very much like humans: “Except for the foulness of their bottoms you would scarcely believe they were animals.”

There were many beneficial roots and herbs and aromatic oils and woods, as well as natural curiosities. There was a river in Quandong that was supposed to turn blue in autumn and a rose that was supposed to change color twice a day.
There was also a drink called tea, which he said was “gradually being introduced in Europe.” Consumption of this beverage is the “main reason there is no gout or stones in China.” It “keeps the oppression of sleep away from those who want to study.” It “is also used for relieving a hangover, and one soon can safely drink again.”

As with many of his books, this one got a lot wrong
and
had a significant influence on its readers. One of the first widely available Western books on the subject, it was so well received that a second Latin edition was published within a year. Jansson and Weyerstraet prepared French and Dutch translations too, and further editions and excerpts were printed in Rome, Antwerp, and London, where the book at least contributed to the English fascination with Chinese language, architecture, and consumption of tea. (A London coffeehouse in Exchange Alley named Garraway's was one of the few to serve tea at the time the book appeared. The British East India Company began to import tea in 1668, a year after
China Illustrated
was published.) Historian Charles D. Van Tuyl, who published an English translation of the book in 1987, says that it “
was probably the single most important written source for shaping the Western understanding of China and its neighbors.”

Kircher's publishers in Amsterdam had already produced or were planning new editions of
Universal Music-making
,
Underground World
, and
The Great Art of Light and Shadow
. Translations and editions of other works had been printed in Leipzig, Würzburg, and Cologne. Copies of his books were in the possession of the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Duke of Saxony, the Duke of Waldstein, and the Duke of Schleswig. They were sold by book merchants in Vienna, London, Naples, Venice, Paris, and Madrid. And they were shipped, carted, and generally lugged to Jesuit colleges and missions all over the world. One French missionary took twenty-four copies of
Universal Music-making
and twelve copies of the four-volume
Egyptian Oedipu
s with him from Lisbon to Peking.

Kircher “
had a global reputation,” says a twenty-first-century scholar, “that was virtually unsurpassed by any early modern author.” And with that fame sometimes came obsessive admirers. When a certain Criollo priest in New Spain named Alejandro Favián first came into contact with
Universal Music-making
, for instance, he was transformed by the experience. “
Truly without exaggeration,” he wrote, “I say nothing better has ever happened to me in my life.” He idled away the hours not only reading Kircher's books and writing him letters but staring at his portrait, which he'd decorated with feathers and gold. Favián even built a museum in which he hoped to display musical machines and optical devices. In imitation of his master he wrote a massive book of his own that he asked Kircher to help him publish. Titled
Universal Ecstatic Tautology
, it sounded more like a send-up of Kircher's work than homage. But the five-volume, three-thousand-page tome was evidently an earnest attempt to encompass all things.

—

IT WOULD HAVE COME
as no surprise to Favián or other infatuated readers that back in Rome the person they assumed was the greatest scholar of his time might collaborate again with the greatest artist of his time on another one of Rome's popular landmarks.

In September 1665, the Dominicans of Santa Maria sopra Minerva (St. Mary Above Minerva)—in whose convent Galileo was tried—were digging the foundations of a wall in their garden, when they found the remains of an obelisk. The site, in the shadow of the Pantheon and a few hundred feet from the Collegio Romano, was known to have been an ancient temple of Isis (Minerva to the Romans). Kircher wrote that his friend the pope sent for him right away: “
Upon learning of the matter, without hesitation, His Own Blessedness summoned me to himself and entrusted to me the charge of examining the situation.” It was the pope's will “that the ruined obelisk be revealed to the public light as quickly as possible in order to hasten the interpretation of the mysteries which are contained in it.”

Kircher was unable to stay in Rome, because of the “approaching solemnity” of an “apostolic mission” at the shrine of Mentorella. So he delegated the task of copying down the markings on the obelisk to a student named Gioseffo Petrucci—“my assistant in the studies of Egyptian antiquities”—ordering Petrucci to send the scheme to him as soon as possible. But the young man, described elsewhere as “secular, originally from Lombardy,” could copy only three of the monument's four sides: “The fourth side was lost on account of the difficulty of rolling the obelisk.” (At about eighteen feet, this obelisk was one of the smallest found in Rome, but eighteen feet of solid granite weighs a figurative if not a literal ton.)

But Kircher wasn't put off by this limitation: “I (let there be praise and honor and glory to God), after completing a most precise scrutiny of the obelisk, grasped the entire series of mysteries hidden beneath it in such a way that not even that fourth side, which had been omitted from the delineation because it was hidden, escaped my comprehension.” It would be risky to share his delineation of all four sides, but he was sure of himself. “Rather bold perhaps in my confidence, although in no way insecure since all ambiguity had been put aside, I sent to Petrucci in Rome the yet uncovered fourth side's scheme.”