Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (20 page)

What Leibniz wanted, it seems, was to develop a correspondence with Kircher to exchange ideas, and also to gain a highly visible benefactor or mentor. Referring vaguely to “new ways of dealing in syllogisms,” and to the “universal, advantageous” ways of bringing figures into the process of “true proclamations,” Leibniz wrote that he had often wished for “one hour” of conversation with Kircher in which to share his ideas—“grand things indeed but nevertheless with an eye to the public good.” He offered his services as a “constant, energetic public announcer” on Kircher's behalf, suggesting he'd be happy even to hear from one of Kircher's “substitutes.”

After continuing this way through two pages of minute ink scratchings, he was about to sign off, “except that one thing is left that is worthy of asking.” Leibniz was referring to “book 3, part 5, chapter 4, problem 1,” of Kircher's
The Magnet
. “You report,” he wrote, “that in the Arabian Market of Marseilles, you found a certain miraculous material, which even when covered turns itself towards the sun, of what sort no Heliotrope has been known to do.”

Of course: the special sunflower seeds or sunflower-like material that Kircher had been intentionally vague about, the claim that also caught Descartes's attention. Two of the most brilliant minds of the seventeenth century had stopped themselves over the same section in a nine-hundred-plus-page book.

Leibniz was a bit confused, or pretended to be. “Concerning this thing,” he wrote, “if it is allowed that I ask, what is the name of the material, whether it is a mineral or something of some king, and from which part of Arabia was the most powerful Market, or from what part did the material originate?”

—

KIRCHER WAS RATHER
condescending in his response to the young courtier from Mainz. He may have had other things on his mind. By debunking alchemy in
Underground World
, for example, he had provoked a firestorm of criticism. In the words of one nineteenth-century writer, “
All the alchymists were in arms immediately to refute this formidable antagonist.” Johann Glauber, a prominent alchemist-pharmacist, and Johann Zwefler, a prominent alchemist-physician, suggested that Kircher's hostility toward them was a form of sour grapes; he had tried but failed to master the alchemical art as they had. One professor from Padua named Bonvicini went so far as to claim that he was actually in possession of the philosopher's stone. As Kircher reported, Bonvicini was then summoned by the Senate of Venice “
to assist them with his gold-making art in paying the expenses of the war against the Turks.” Unable to make good on his claims, “his mind collapsed and he fell into a melancholia, of which he died eight days later.”

One critic, a “
true pupil of this art” going by the name Salomone de Blauenstein, published a tract,
In Defense of the Philosophers' Stone, In Opposition to the Anti-Alchemy Mundus Subterraneus of the Jesuit Father Kircher
in which not only are his arguments calculated against alchemy refuted, but even the skill itself is made manifest to intelligent men insofar as it is possible.
His evidence included a story about a Pole named Sendigovius who changed quicksilver into gold in the presence of the Holy Roman Emperor sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century—it had to be true, since the emperor had commemorated the transmutation with a plaque. He also engaged in the increasingly popular pastime of pointing out Kircher's errors. Kircher was under the incorrect impression, for example, that
Arnold of Villanova, the thirteenth-century physician to whom many alchemical tracts and the discovery of carbon monoxide are attributed, was actually two different people: Arnold and Villanova.

“
When he read how I had very clearly revealed all the vanities and impostures of the alchemists, as well as the chimera of the Philosopher's Stone . . .” Kircher explained in a letter, “he was thrown into a rage.” To Kircher, this “Blauenstein” person was not only “an imposter” but “a lying clown and a defrocked monk.”

PART THREE

19

Not As It Was

A
s 1671 began, the aging Kircher had reason to feel optimistic. His publishers in Amsterdam put out a beautifully illustrated edition of
Latium
, his study of the area around Rome. It read less like a work of history than a tour through the surrounding countryside by way of ancient literature. According to Kircher, Noah's family had indeed settled in the region, making it “the primeval seat and colony of the earliest mortals.” Moreover, he said,
Noah's traits and qualities served as the inspiration for the gods of Roman and Greek mythology. The book was really an attempt to reconcile old texts, Roman mythology, and the Bible with the actual geography and archaeological evidence of the place. The maps and engravings depicted the region “
not as it was,” as he strangely put it in one case, “but as it could and must have been.”

Those who had devoted much of their lives to studying the topography and ruins of the region unfortunately found this otherwise handsome book to be, in the words of a modern writer, “
flawed beyond belief.” One of these scholars published an entire catalog of the errors to be found in
Latium,
wondering in print whether Kircher had ever actually been to some of the sites he wrote about.

More embarrassment came from the laboratory of Francesco Redi in Florence. After publishing
Experiments on the Generation of Insects
, in which he disproved Kircher's claims about spontaneous generation, Redi found himself reading Kircher's accounts of the healing power of the snake stone in
China Illustrated
and
The Magnetic Kingdom of Nature
. It happened that Redi had taken up the topic of snake stones, too. Plenty of them had been presented to the grand duke by travelers from abroad. Redi was head of the Medici pharmacy, which produced its own vintages of viper-rich theriaca, so he also had plenty of snakes on hand. Over several years he'd conducted five sets of experiments in front of witnesses, using a wide selection of snake stones on a range of bird species, including guinea hens, rock pigeons, and barnyard chickens. In fact, Redi employed a total of two hundred fifty vipers in these and other experiments on snake venom and toxicology. The porous snake stone did have a tendency to stick to the skin, but except in a few of what Redi called “freak” instances, all the birds and animals that had been bitten by vipers died.

In 1671, Redi published his conclusions, that snake stones did not heal victims of poisoning, in a public letter addressed directly to Kircher:
Experiments on various natural things and in particular on those that have been brought from India, carried out by Francesco Redi and described in a Letter to Father Athanasius Kircher of the Company of Jesus
. As Redi later explained: “
The principal point of this letter was for me the experiments which I conducted with this stone, which notwithstanding the witnessing of so many authors, has always, always proved itself to me in all trials most useless and of no value.”

At the same time, an Englishman, Sir Samuel Morland, had been testing an amplifying device he called the
tuba Stentoro-phonica
—also known as the “
speaking trumpet.” In the twenty-first century this device is known as the megaphone. The king's master of mechanics, Morland had fabricated initial prototypes out of glass and brass but settled on copper as his material of choice. Charles II himself, along with Prince Rupert and other members of the English nobility, participated in a trial in St. James Park. “Standing at the end of the Mall near Old Spring-Garden,” according to Morland's account, they heard Morland “word for word” from the other end, about eight hundred fifty yards away.

In another trial, statements made through a sixteen-foot trumpet at Cuckold's Point could be heard in a rowboat about a mile and a half down the Thames. At the king's direction, further experiments were conducted off the ramparts at Deal Castle up on the English coast: with the wind blowing from the shore, words spoken through a twenty-one-foot horn were understood as far as three miles out in the channel. The king, persuaded of the many uses of the speaking trumpet—among them commands to whole fleets, commands to whole armies, commands to hundreds of workers, messages of relief to citizens of besieged cities and towns, and messages of intimidation and hostility to the citizens of besieged cities and towns—ordered that a number of them be made. The speaking trumpet caused a kind of sensation. A smaller version of the horn could be purchased together with Morland's little volume on the subject in the shop of Moses Pitt, a prominent London bookseller. It wasn't long before the trumpets were being sold in various sizes and dimensions around Europe.

Morland accounted for the effect in (erroneous) terms reminiscent of those Kircher had used many years before. He wrote about “Rays of Sound” that reverberate and undulate within the cone, “in the same manner as the Rays of the Sun.” To Kircher—who had been experimenting with the use of conical tubes as sound amplifiers since he had installed the eavesdropping tube in his cubiculum—the notion that Morland had invented this speaking trumpet was outrageous. As if his fate rested on being remembered as the inventor of the megaphone, Kircher became determined to show how well his own brand of
acoustical tube “might extend itself” if taken outdoors and put to the kind of tests Morland had conducted.

“A tube fifteen palms in length and elaborated with singular zeal” was hauled up to Mentorella, the retreat where on other occasions Kircher sought to reacquaint himself with humility. The “situation of this place was marvelously appropriate and most suitable of all for testing a tube,” he wrote, and “at a fitting and peaceful time, both during the day and at night, we tested it.”

Underlings notified the people who lived on the “circumambient throng of castles which are discerned from the very peak of this crag and are removed by distances of two, three, four and five Italian miles.” When Kircher and others began speaking through the tube “with vehement voice,” the people in the hilltop castles of the valley signaled back—in the daytime by raising a curtain or flag, at night by the “combustion of flame”—“that they had distinctly perceived the words one by one.”

Speaking trumpets, from
Phonurgia Nova

After this “consummate success,” the tube was used to invite all the people within range to services for Pentecost, the feast that comes fifty days after Easter, when the Holy Spirit is said to have descended on the apprehensive disciples. As if “thunderstruck by a voice slipping down from the heavens,” Kircher claimed, twenty-two hundred people came. Moreover, “several men, conspicuous in their grandeur, had been stirred by the allurement of the polyphonic instrument from even more remote places; they hastened forth not so much for the sake of devotion as for seeing the tube.”

All of this was contained in Kircher's next book, his twenty-seventh, depending on how you counted the various editions. Whichever number it was, the book was the first in Europe devoted exclusively to acoustics, put together almost entirely to make his case against Morland. Indeed, apart from the speaking-tube experiments, much of
Phonurgia Nova
(
New Work on Producing Sound
)—the material on echoes, the properties of sound, and so on—was rehashed from
Universal Music-making
.

“I deem it necessary that the following be made clear to the reader, namely that he not persuade himself that this invention new to this time was brought from England but that around twenty-four years prior it was exhibited in the Roman College,” Kircher wrote. “It was this very tube that afterwards was approved, by the stupor of all, for its propagation of voice into spaces most remote with altogether fertile success.”

If Kircher wasn't going to get the credit, that didn't mean Morland should. As he'd described in
Universal Music-making
, Alexander the Great was said to have used a giant horn to direct his armies from great distances. There was no telling the degree to which the speaking tube could help in the ongoing fight against the Turks.

—

THE OLD PRIEST
did everything he could to make sure he would be remembered. He began to write the story of his early life. But in 1672, there was more bad news: an assistant to the Jesuit superior general informed him that his museum would have to be moved. Rather than remain in the long, light-filled gallery on the third floor, its home for two decades, it would now have to occupy, as one record has it, “a small dark corridor near the second floor infirmary.” The new site was “quite obscure.”

Historical accounts suggest the corridor was needed to gain access to the choir of Sant'Ignazio, the Jesuit church abutting the college; it had been under construction for many years. But as Kircher understood it, Jesuit authorities wanted to expand the library. He objected to the move in a letter to the general in May of that year, referring to the original donation of antiquities in 1651. “
Thoroughly animated both by a bequest of this kind of such immense and multifarious size and variety and by the established space,” he wrote, “it was I who did nothing other than decorate it with worthy magnificence by means of expenses from my own resources, as well as those of my superiors, with pictures and with machines and with other necessary things beyond my poverty.

“It occurred then that with the passage of time . . . through this museum the Roman College acquired a celebrity of reputation so great throughout all of Europe that it seemed no foreigner who had not seen the Museum of the Roman College could say that he had been to Rome.”

Kircher pleaded with the general to at least consider modifications to the new space. He made a point of saying that his request had nothing to do with concern for his own reputation.

“For since the place is dark, so that it can have a more rich source of light, the windows must be widened by two palms, and it must be fitted with glass laminas, while also the two bed chambers, which have no use on account of the privation of light, must be broken through and made suitable for housing so many and diverse a multiplicity of objects,” he wrote.

“For should these things be done I trust that the museum may maintain its own pristine dignity.” But they weren't done, and there's no record of a reply.

—

KIRCHER'S GRADUAL DECLINE
in reputation among Jesuits and among the intellectual elite of Europe (to the extent that they had held him in high esteem) came as others were just becoming acquainted with him.

“
Does the conference of learned persons please you?” one travelogue author asked. “See Father Kircher for unknown languages and mathematics.”

Kircher passed along observations of Jupiter and Venus to Louis XIV's astronomer royal, and word came back that the
French king himself had “deep respect” for his work on hieroglyphics.

Letters continued to arrive from people like Philipp Jakob Sachs von Löwenheim, a doctor in Breslau, and Gaspard de Varadier de Saint-Andiol, the archbishop of Arles. Correspondents wanted to discuss the curative nature of warm mineral springs (were their benefits miraculous or not?), the effectiveness of amulets, and their own investigations into spontaneous generation, carried out, in at least one instance, with fish roe in tubs of milk.

The
rector of the Jesuit college of Vilnius wrote to say that he was so beholden to Kircher for so much knowledge and information that he was thinking of adding “Kircherianes” to his name.

Kircher was asked to interpret the hieroglyphic inscriptions on a sarcophagus recently transported from Egypt to Lyon. The resulting text, along with Kircher's thoughts on Egyptian burial practices and reincarnation, became the basis for yet another book, although an uncharacteristically slim one; it was only seventy-two pages long.

It was for a boy king, Charles II of Spain, that Kircher took up matters of the Bible. Charles was the nephew and the grandson of Maria Anna of Spain, who had married the Emperor Ferdinand III; he was also the grandson and the great-grandson of Margaret of Austria, a queen of Spain, Ferdinand III's aunt. The product of so much intermarriage within the Hapsburg family, he suffered not only from a grotesque example of the Hapsburg chin and lip, but also from an enlarged head and an oversize tongue that made it difficult to eat and to speak. Physical infirmities prevented him from walking until he was eight, and he had some sort of learning disability. Charles's deficiencies later included the inability to father a child, and he would come to symbolize the end of the Hapsburg era. Kircher, now in his seventies, lent an almost childlike quality to his illustrated volumes on Noah's ark and the Tower of Babel for this poor young reader.

Even a child might want a book on the ark to address what have been called “
various practical problems” with the story—problems related to fitting two of every single living species on board a vessel built by a five-hundred-year-old man and his three sons. To help resolve these, and to try to determine the exact specifications for the ark that Noah had received from God, Kircher compared the texts in Hebrew, Chaldean, Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek. Making use of Galileo's studies of floating bodies to figure the ark's buoyancy, he created a schematic foldout showing each animal's assigned spot. This space-planning exercise was supported by detailed speculation on the care and feeding of the animals, as well as on issues of sanitation. Noah didn't have to include animals that resulted, as Kircher believed, from interspecies mating, such as the mule (the real result of relations between a horse and donkey) and the giraffe (the result of intimacy, he claimed, between a camel and a panther). Deer would have been invited on board, but reindeer didn't need to be, because, as he seemed to suggest, animals have a way of adapting, if not evolving, under different environmental circumstances.