Tenmon Zukai
The Tenmon Zukai, published in xx in 16xx, is the first Japanese book on astronomy. Although most of the eastern, and all of the western traditions of astronomy studied in Japan at that time were introduced from China, making the book somewhat derivative, it nevertheless presents an important printed record of Japanese astronomical science and practice. The figure above, which appears on two facing pages, provides a fascinating juxtaposition of eastern and western views of cosmology and astronomy.
Vesalius
The appearance of Vesalius’ xx in 1543 was a pivotal moment in the science of anatomy. The book rightly remains esteemed as the first and most important modern anatomical treatise. Although many anatomical manuscripts and books pre-date 1543, they are characterized by a clumsy, schematic portrayal of the human body that was largely speculative, owing to the Christian church’s opposition to autopsy and dissection of the human body. The plates of Vesalius display a stunning realism and detail, drawn from life using cadavers that were often covertly obtained and dissected.
The first edition appeared as a large folio of monumental format, which was reproduced in the second edition of xx. In 1568 a third edition was printed in Venice in a smaller format more suited to actual use in the operating theater and anatomical laboratory. The plates were recut in reduced size and without the decorative backgrounds present in the earlier editions, in keeping with the book’s more practical purpose.
[Newton] Chatelet, xx
In 1759 Madame de Chatelet, under the guidance of Voltaire, published the first (and what is still the only) definitive translation of Newton’s Principia into French. By this time the western world had largely accepted that Newton had formulated a mechanistic natural philosophy that correctly described gravitation and celestial mechanics, replacing the competing and largely qualitative Cartesian philosophy with a quantitative physics. It is widely supposed that Newtonian and Cartesian science predicted different characteristics of observable phenomena (such as the shape of the earth), and thus that the better science would be the one that made the correct prediction, but in fact the distinction was that Newtonian mechanics made quantifiable predictions while Cartesian mechanics did not. Thus the success of Newtonian physics derived from its practical utility. In essence, Cartesians were more concerned with causes while Newtonian science was more concerned with effects. Newton himself underscored this point in the General Scholium to the second edition of the Principia in his famous pronouncement hypothesis non fingo (I frame no hypotheses) about the mechanism or cause of gravitation.
However, a rear guard of Cartesians (mainly French Jesuits) continued in a vain attempt to find physical phenomena that were not correctly described by Newtonian mechanics, while arguing vigorously with its philosophical foundations. This copy of Chatelet’s translation was owned and annotated by one such person. The first fifty pages of the book, where Newton presents his fundamental axioms and laws, and his philosophical position, are almost completely covered, in the margins and between the lines, with a dense and highly animated counter-argument from the Cartesian standpoint. Although the annotator has not yet been identified, there is circumstantial evidence that it might have been xx Bertier, a Jesuit who was associated with a small group of stubborn Cartesians that made a bogus claim in 17xx to have measured deviations from the inverse square law of gravitation between the base and top of a mountain. That was arguably the last Cartesian gasp that could have been assigned even a shred of credibility.
Heavily annotated books such as this one, echoing the voices of long dead readers and writers, provide a unique insight into the scholarly and scientific combat that shaped the modern world.
William Cowper, Myotomia reformata, or an anatomical treatise on the muscles of the human body illustrated with figures after the life, London 1724
This large folio book is considered to be one of the most beautiful anatomical atlases of the 18th century. In addition to full and half-page plates, many in the style of Rubens and Raphael, there are many ingenious historiated initial letters incorporating anatomical elements into the letter designs.
August II of Luneberg (Gustavus Selenus pseud), Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae libri IX , Luneberg 1624
This celebrated renaissance book on codes and cryptography (largely derived from the 16th century Steganography of Trithemius) presents a comprehensive survey of encryption and code-breaking methods, including examples of substitution ciphers, musical ciphers, steganography (the embedding of secret messages in a larger text), graphical encryption in images, and other techniques. The book has some notoriety in the (seemingly endless) Shakespeare-Bacon authorship debate – the title page has been interpreted as a visual code depicting Bacon (at the desk at bottom) writing the plays, which are then handed to a courier (right center), who delivers them to ‘shakespear’ (the man with the spear and the actor’s buskins, left center). Bacon was a skilled cryptographer.
Lazarus Ercker, Beschreibung allerfurnemisten mineralischen Ertzt unnd Bergwercks Arten, Franfurt 1580
Ercker’s Beschreibung allerfurnemisten mineralischen Ertzt unnd Bergwercks Arten (i.e., Description of leading ore processing and mining methods) is (along with Biringuccio’s Pyrotechnia and Agricola’s De Re Metallica) one of the three seminal 16th century works on mining and metallurgy. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica “it may be regarded as the first manual of analytic and metallurgical chemistry”. It is justly renowned for the many superb full page woodcut illustrations of laboratory and mining operations.
Agostino Ramelli, Le Diverse et artificiose machine, Paris 1588
Andrea Pozzo, Perspective Proper for Artists and Architects, translated into English by John James, London n.d. (ca 1725).
By the end of the 17th century the development of geometric perspective, and its applications in drawing, had been advanced to a very high level, as exemplified by the illustrations in Pozzo’s treatise on architectural perspective. Pozzo’s works, initially published in Italian, were very popular, being reprinted numerous times and translated into several languages, including German and English.