DAVID FREEDBERG The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History - Book Review

DAVID FREEDBERG

The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 525 pp.; 83 color ills., 89 b/w. $50.00

   Once some fathers came to see [Galileo],
   and he was working in his garden and
   observing how the buds came out. He said,
   "I am ashamed that you see me in this
   clown's habit; I'll go in and dress myself as
   a philosopher."
      "Why don't you have this work done by
   someone else?"
      "No, no; I should lose the pleasure. If I
   thought it as much fun to have things
   done as it is to do them, I'd be glad to."--
   Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work, 1978 (1)

So said Vincenzio Viviani, Galileo's first biographer, to the young Sir Robert Southwell in 1661, and so Stillman Drake began his Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography in 1978. Whatever the anecdote meant to his English visitor, Viviani and his fellow Florentines would have seen in it an inversion of Niccolo Machiavelli's famous letter to Francesco Vettori, where the disgraced statesman alleged that each evening he exchanged his clothes, covered with the "filth and slime" of his countryside retreat, for "royal and courtly habits" in order to study the ancients, to interrogate them, to embody them, and to forget for a time cares, poverty, and death. While the story conveyed to Drake Galileo's industry, his cheerful disregard for social convention, his candor, and his evident appreciation of the natural world, more recent scholarship has done much to alter this appealing portrait, substituting at times a heretical, calculating, and courtly figure far closer to, though no less fallible than, the masked Machiavelli.

What remains unresolved is precisely how this vignette of Galileo at leisure relates to Drake's Galileo at Work. This is the concern of David Freedberg's The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History, a magisterial study of the ambitions, accomplishments, and sublime failures of the earliest scientific society, the Academy of the Linceans, or sharp-sighted ones. Galileo's smiling and slightly chilling affirmation that when it suited him he could, and did, have things done by others, is borne out by Freedberg's reconstruction of the activities of the Linceans from the establishment of their academy in 1603 through the publication of their Treasury of Medical Matters of New Spain in 1649-51. The naturalists, philologists, and historians who surrounded the scientist, and the several unknown artists who assisted them and documented their findings, conducted the greater part of their research in the successive wakes of each Galilean discovery and its ensuing debate. This is not to contest Galileo's own interest in natural history: the scattered references to the motion and bodies of birds and beasts in the Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems and the Two New Sciences; to the cinnamon trees of the New World in the Assayer; to the cultivation of grapes, oranges, olives, and peaches in the Dialogue; and to the appearance of a rain-soaked cabbage plant in Two New Sciences all suggest an experienced and interested observer of plants and animals. The Eye of the Lynx, however, confirms that what served as the occasional leisurely activity for Galileo constituted an enormous and sustained research program for his fellow Linceans and, more significantly, a body of knowledge they consistently sought to relate to his discoveries in astronomy, optics, and even mechanics.

Freedberg's chronicle begins, however, with a discovery of his own, that of hundreds of early modern natural history drawings in a cupboard in Windsor Castle in 1986. These illustrations, many of them beautifully reproduced in color in The Eye of the Lynx, depict birds, beasts, plants, flowers, fruits, fossils, fungi, and gems from the New and Old Worlds, with, variously, the monstrous, the typical, and the telling detail as their focus. Originally commissioned by the 17th-century connoisseur and antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo for his museo cartaceo, or "paper museum," these and several thousand others discovered in the British Museum, in the library of the old medical school at Montpellier, and at the Institut de France in Paris all had as their source the Academy of the Linceans. Freedberg then describes the establishment of the academy by the eighteen-year-old prince of Acquasparta, Federico Cesi, its focus on natural philosophy, the contributions and frailties of its four founding members, and its inclusion of the Neapolitan magus and playwright Giambattista della Porta in 1610 and Galileo in 1611. Though the third, fourth, and fifth chapters offer the now familiar narrative of Galileo's observation and discussion of the new star of 1604, the cratered moon in 1609-10, the spotted sun in 1611-13, and the comets of 1618, Freedberg's account emphasizes the pivotal roles played by various members of the academy, particularly by Cesi, his exasperating and bigoted colleague Johannes Heckius, and the gifted naturalists Fabio Colonna and Johannes Faber.

But the most informative and absorbing chapters of The Eye of the Lynx are those five devoted to the research programs of the academy, their ambitious project to collect, codify, and illustrate all that Earth, rather than the heavens, had to offer. Their story is and is not a natural history, for it is here that the central tension between Galileo's endeavors and those of his fellow Linceans is most pronounced. As Freedberg rightly suggests in the last section of his work, the Linceans were finally forced to acknowledge--in a way that even the blind and disgraced Galileo was not--the very limits of vision. Their four decades of patient acquisition, examination, classification, and depiction of local and exotic species of plants, animals, and minerals resulted in a vast wilderness of knowledge, a suffocating superabundance of unconnected facts only much later articulated as a coherent natural history. Something of the horror of the unchecked growth of this sort of research--and none of the enthusiasm that had for so long sustained the Linceans--is conveyed in Benedetto Castelli's unpublished "Discourse on the Magnet," written in Rome between 1639 and 1641. Addressing himself to another prominent clergyman who was also a covert Copernican, Castelli asked his correspondent not to circulate his work, especially

   not to those who take pleasure in contemplating
   Nature, and her great works, in
   books, and in piles of paper, heaping up
   wholesale a great harvest of them, and
   filling vast storerooms with them at great
   expense, without ever deigning to lift their
   eyes to reflect on this great Book of the
   Heavens, which was nonetheless written by
   the hand of God .... (2)

The trope of the unread Book of the Heavens had already been used by Galileo to criticize bona fide enemies, rather than the loyal friends he had among the Linceans, and it is in any case difficult to know, in the aftermath of the astronomer's abjuration, precisely whose attention Castelli feared. It is worth noting, however, both that he was in close contact with the last of the Linceans, Francesco Stelluti, and that the general tenor of the project he described--its bookish appreciation of a seemingly terrestrial version of nature, and its enormous and costly collection of unbound paper--conforms to the academy's efforts to publish Francisco Hernandez's vast manuscript on the history of the plants and animals of New Spain, to pry copies of its many illustrations from a needy book collector, to complement the material from Mexico with endless additions and annotations, and to locate, as would happen only in 1649, a patron for an undertaking begun a world away in 1570. To suggest that the venture concerned a resolute avoidance of the Book of the Heavens is accurate in the sense that the Linceans' sometime involvement in Galileo's astronomical research greatly delayed the already difficult publication of the Treasury of Medical Matters of New Spain.

Whatever Castelli's intentions, it would be inaccurate to maintain that the Linceans worked without reflecting on the great Book of the Heavens: a crucial paradox of The Eye of the Lynx is the relationship of the terrestrial to the celestial. Despite their eagerness to escape the antiquated systems of similitude and signatures, the "old sciences of surface," the Linceans could not have failed to notice that Galileo's most important astronomical discoveries depended precisely on a presumed identity between surface and essence. To use the available oxymoron, Galileo's science was "profoundly superficial" in that the apparent surfaces of the Moon, Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun told him a great deal about those bodies and our planet. Almost a decade before his use of the Dutch telescope, for instance, the ashen glow with which the Moon is sometimes covered suggested to Galileo, among others, that Earth was a reasonably good reflector of light and thus probably a planet. Galileo's telescopic observations of the Moon's opaque and cratered surface from 1609 onward confirmed his impression of its similarity to our globe; his discovery of the moons of Jupiter in early 1610 persuaded him, if not all who read the Starry Messenger, that encirclement by satellites was neither unique to Earth nor an impediment to its planetary movement. What he saw in the play of light and shadow on Venus's surface late that same year substantiated for him much less about that planet than about ours, for these observations served as a confirmation of Copernican claims and as evidence against both the Ptolemaic and Tychonic models. In 1612 and 1613 Galileo treated the spots observed on or near the Sun's surface as proof of its essence as a mutable heavenly body, and later he successfully predicted the particular paths the spots would merely appear to take, arguing that these illusory variations were a function of Earth's annual movement.

To oversimplify, then, Galileo's telescopic observations of remote surfaces and of appearances he knew to be illusions were revelatory in a way that the Linceans' microscopic scrutiny of matters at hand could not be. The sheer availability of terrestrial data was of no help, as Galileo himself would recognize in the third of his Letters on the Sunspots:

    I seem to be equally ignorant of the substances
    of the Earth as of those of the
    Moon, of the simple clouds as of the spots
    on the Sun. Nor do I see that, in understanding
    these nearby substances, we have
    any other advantage than the abundance
    of details: all are equally unknown, and we
    wander through them, passing from one
    to the other with little or no acquisition of
    knowledge .... Such wisdom is reserved
    from us until we reach the state of beatitude:
    we will not have it before then. (3)

The sentiments Galileo expressed with such troubling pessimism in this, his first publication as a Lincean, were surely not shared by his fellow academicians, then optimistically embarked on a research program understood as the complement of his. The relationship between the two sorts of endeavors seems to me most crucial in the Linceans' work in microscopy and in their investigation of fossils, which Freedberg addresses in chapters 6, 7, and 11. In what follows I will insist--at times more than he does--on this intellectual affiliation, its causes, and its consequences.

Consider the difficulty with which the microscope separated itself from the early telescope. That the Dutch or Galileian telescope was immediately adapted for microscopy in Padua is not surprising, and there is evidence to suggest that something of the same took place, or was at least discussed, in Naples, in the newly founded Accademia degli Oziosi, or Academy of the Leisurely Ones, to which the Lincean Giambattista della Porta belonged. Such experimentation would indeed have been likely in that the academy's founder, Giambattista Manso, well acquainted with the Lincean mathematicians Luca Valerio and Colantonio Stelliola, was a very early and enthusiastic follower of Galileo's work, commented in 1610 on della Porta's invidious reaction to it, and later claimed to have improved on a telescopic device developed by the Neapolitan magus. The Leisurely Ones themselves were specifically enjoined to study not just poetics, rhetoric, and philology but also "the mathematical disciplines"; their emblem, an eagle staring into the sun, was clearly an alternative to that of the sharp-eyed lynx. An index of the intellectual timidity, or political perspicacity, that distinguished them from the Linceans lies in the epic poem of Manso's protege and their sometime prince, Giambattista Marino, whose Adone of 1623 left the cratered Moon, telescope, and Galileo inconveniently stranded in a Ptolemaic universe.

It is significant, then, that a story written between 1615 and 1630 by another early member of that academy, Giambattista Basile, features an oversize flea, a hyperbolic version of the vermin then currently examined with such peculiar pleasure by those armed with either microscopes or telescopes. Like all tales in Basile's Pentamerone, this one begins with a matter-of-fact summary of extraordinary events:

   A king, who had very little to think about,
   fed a flea until it became as big as a sheep,
   had it flayed, and offered his daughter as a
   prize to he who could recognize the animal's
   hide. An ogre knew it by its smell,
   and helped himself to the princess, who
   was liberated by the seven feats of the
   seven sons of an old woman. (4)

What Basile does not say, of course, is that the magnification of the flea is a temporary illusion produced by lenses: this creature simply grows as a result of the attentions of a king with too little to concern him, and the tale itself ends with his apology for such capricious behavior. It is not clear that the Leisurely Ones, given over to "an erudite and virtuous idleness" (5) and ruled by an elected "prince," likewise sought to enlarge a flea--presumably with lenses and under the guidance of della Porta--or if the tale is to be understood as a spoof on the no less otiose activities of the prince of Acquasparta and his associates. But Basile is more explicitly concerned with Galileo, della Porta, and optical devices in another story of the Pentamerone. In "The Two Brothers"--whose very title at once evokes della Porta's most famous play, The Two Rival Brothers, and suggests an unsuccessful erasure of the competition between the two Linceans--Basile describes close-range magnification of a creature's eyes, precisely the kind of thing undertaken, as Freedberg shows, in Prince Cesi's circle. What is at stake here, however, is no insect but an ailing and grotesquely thin princess, her eyes being "so sunken that Galileo's glass was needed to see her pupils." (6) And in a third story, where one would more reasonably expect mention of either Galileo or della Porta, Basile alludes to a device "two palms in length that takes in one hundred miles of sea," (7) but refers to it simply as an acchiale de vista longa, as if nothing were to be gained by establishing its paternity.

I have portrayed Basile's presentation of magnification, with its purely fictitious enlargement of the flea, its casual substitution of sick princesses for interesting insects, and its insistence on the rivalrous relationship of della Porta and Galileo, as the obverse face of the Linceans' more decorous efforts in microscopy, for all was otherwise with their Barberini bees. In his very engaging account of the academy's Melissographia, Apes Dianiae, and Apiarium, published in the wake of Maffeo Barberini's election to the papacy, Freedberg examines the task of accommodating a wealth of apicultural lore and the more recent revelations of microscopy to both the general demands of panegyric and the particular character of Urban VIII. To some extent, the task of the Melissographia, a large engraving showing magnified bees in startling detail, had been scripted a century earlier in Le api, Giovanni Rucellai's translation of the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics. In one of the several innovations of that work, Rucellai noted that he had observed bees at close range with a concave mirror and had dissected them--flaying them, perhaps, as Basile's idle king would do with his flea. Though he described their bodies in far greater detail than had Virgil, his account was entirely free of images, so that the Melissographia functions as a kind of completion of and corrective to that poem and its great Latin source.

There is much, in fact, in Le api that made it a model waiting to be surpassed by the Linceans. Rucellai, first cousin to Pope Leo X, may well have encountered the useful magnifying mirror in the papal orbit, for the pontiff had an interest in optical devices and was believed by many of Galileo's peers to have owned a primitive version of the telescope. Though a clear beneficiary of the extravagant Medici papacy, Rucellai wrote his poem too late to profit from this patron, a risk not countenanced by the Linceans. And yet Le api appears in hindsight more astute than the triple offering made to Urban VIII. Directly after his discussion of the magnifying mirror, for instance, Rucellai noted with evident disbelief what he had often read but had never observed, that the "king" of the hive used his stinger only as a scepter. As Freedberg points out, in his Apiarium Cesi was happy to resuscitate what turned out to be a wholly untenable argument, as if the pope's magnanimity could somehow be prescribed through such wishful descriptions of docile urban bees. Rucellai's famous formal innovation is likewise significant here, for his is one of the earliest and most influential examples of versi sciolti, or unrhymed hendecasyllabic verse. It began with the confession that when he was contemplating translating Virgil's work on apiculture, a chorus of bees, approaching him in a dream, reported that they regarded rhyme as pompous and repetitive, a slight variation on the detestable echo. In terms of Maffeo Barberini's rather few vernacular poems, Rucellai's formal recommendations were without effect, but the pope's much more important neo-Latin Poemata were described in terms wholly consonant with the spirit of most defenses of versi sciolti; both were strongly associated with the recovery of an ancient liberty of expression after a phase of medieval barbarism, as well as with the exposition of recent developments in the sciences. More crucially, Rucellai presented the bees--whoever they were supposed to represent--as imperious connoisseurs, hypersensitive to sound, quite explicit about how they were to be presented and about what they did and did not want to hear. Urban VIII's response to the experimentation in the Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, as well as in Tommaso Campanella's commentaries on the pope's Poemata, (8) showed this description to be perfectly true of him.

It is undeniable, however, that the punctilious apicultural associations so hopefully promoted by the Linceans in the mid-1620s were also evident to those visitors to Rome who were quite hostile to the papacy, most notably the young John Milton, who saw the city in 1638 just after his visit to the blind and imprisoned Galileo and just before calling on Giambattista Manso in Naples. This would have been the moment to recognize if not the absolute triumph of the Barberini, at least the ways in which the Lincean program had fallen short of its original ideals. Even if, as Milton put it, "mulcenturque novo maculosi carmine lynces" (the spotted lynxes were soothed by the novel song) that was Marino's Adone, (9) Galileo had "grown old a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers," (10) and Manso's cautious and conservative academy appeared the more successful institution. Barberini Rome remained a thriving hive and the model for the infernal Pandemonium of Paradise Lost, where Satan's minions were explicitly described as bees, virtual doubles of those contemplated by the Linceans. And even Imperial Rome may have been, for Milton, something of a hive: in Paradise Regained, Satan shows Christ a host of distant cities from a mountaintop outside Jericho; Rome alone, swarming with numberless visitors and endless activity, is seen through an "Aerie Microscope," an infernal version of the tool used in such good faith by the Linceans.

To resume, then: the not infrequent substitution of the microscope for the telescope, and a sense of an actual continuum between the two, is emblematic of the curious entanglement of the Linceans' endeavors in natural history with Galileo's discoveries. Such connections emerge even more provocatively in their flawed understanding of fossils, for the Lincean hypotheses presented by Freedberg in chapter 11 appear to me strongly influenced by the Pisan scientist's arguments about atomism and scale. In what follows, I will try to reconstruct how and why such disparate studies were sutured together.

The collection at Windsor Castle is particularly rich in splendid drawings of fossilized wood, of baked clays, and of the fumaroles around Acquasparta. These depictions display considerable accuracy: some feature cross sections of fossils, fragments, and in situ drawings, and many are adorned with a specialized vocabulary that the Linceans developed to characterize their discoveries. Their correspondence also reflects an abiding interest in the origin of fossilia--meaning anything dug up from the earth--and particularly in that of substances seemingly between wood and stone, some of which Isabella Salviati, the late Lincean Filippo Salviati's sister and Cesi's widow, had carved into tables for the Medici in 1635.

As Freedberg remarks, however, the publication of 1637 that resulted from these decades of research in what they called officinae naturae, or "workshops of Nature," the Lincean Francesco Stelluti's Treatise on Fossil Mineral Wood, is both surprisingly meager and strangely flawed. The hypothesis that fallen trees had eventually become petrified, which they had held in the mid-1620s, was for the most part discarded; Stelluti argued instead that the earth, slowly heated by certain sulfurous subterranean fires observed in the region, was converted into wood. Only occasionally did the wood undergo a final metamorphosis into stone.

Though Freedberg interprets the relative frailty of Stelluti's explanation of petrified wood as an awareness of the very problematic relation of fossilia in general to scriptural accounts of Creation and of the Noachian flood, I would insist more on the Galilean source of these arguments, for the discussion of rarefaction and condensation in his last great work, Two New Sciences, presented those processes in terms oddly reminiscent of the Lincean understanding of legno minerale. The argument, written in the fall of 1634, long predated the publication; Galileo had discussed aspects of rarefaction and condensation with Filippo Salviati in 1611 and 1612 and had returned to it, with disastrous results, in his Assayer of 1623.

   If condensation and rarefaction are opposing
   changes, then wherever great rarefaction
   is found, condensation no less
   enormous cannot be denied. We see daily
   immense rarefaction; and what is still
   more remarkable, this is almost instantaneous.
   I refer to the boundless rarefaction
   of a small amount of gunpowder,
   when it is resolved into a vast bulk of fire.
   And what of the almost unlimited expansion
   of its light? If that fire and light
   were to be reunited--which is not impossible,
   seeing that they previously took
   up so little space--what a condensation
   that would be! Reasoning thus, you will
   find thousands of like rarefactions,
   which are more readily observed than
   condensations, since materials that are
   dense to begin with are more tractable
   and more subjected to our senses. We
   can handle wood, and see it resolved
   into fire and light; but we do not thus see
   fire and light condensed to constitute
   wood. We see fruits, flowers, and a thousand
   other solid materials resolved (as a
   general rule) into odors; but we do not
   observe odorous atoms coming together
   in the constitution of scented solids. But
   where we lack sensory observations, their
   place may be supplied by reasoning .... (11)

The two fiery forms of rarefaction are the recent method of extracting metals and stones through explosives, mentioned several pages earlier in the treatise, and the older and more primitive technique of fire setting, or heating the rock and spraying it with water until it split and the ore could be removed. This discussion is part of an ongoing debate usually associated with atomism by both opponents and supporters of that doctrine; the nature of explosion was scrutinized in this way by Paolo Sarpi and Jean Bodin in the 1580s and 1590s, by Francis Bacon in 1620, by Galileo's archenemy Orazio Grassi in 1626, by Rene Descartes in 1638 and 1644, and by Fortunio Liceti in 1646. Condensation was typically presented as a compensatory response to the rarefaction of explosion, and both processes as plausible alternatives to a world of vacua and interpenetration of bodies.

It is clear, however, that Galileo's meditation was an important variant on the issue, for condensation appears neither to follow instantaneously on rarefaction nor to be associated solely with the dramatic effects of explosion. Were the fire and light resulting from the explosion of gunpowder suddenly reunited--were the explosion simply undone--then condensation or return to an earlier state would indeed "produce" a form of plant life, for about 15 percent of the powder then derived from charcoal, and a very familiar way to obtain its chief ingredient, potassium nitrate, was from the ashes of certain trees. The process by which potassium nitrate was refined, moreover, consumed abundant fire-wood, such that any imaginative reconstitution of unexploded gunpowder, or any actual assemblage of its components, would inevitably involve a vast number of trees. The same results would also hold true for any "condensation" of fire setting, which depended on equal or perhaps greater amounts of trees, which most Europeans then recognized as a very scarce resource.

Galileo's meditation, somewhat fantastical in that it only hinted at the irreversibility of these processes, implying instead the workings of a providential Nature, found an optimistic echo in Stelluti's depiction of the production of fossil wood:

   This conversion into wood I believe to
   take place with the assistance of the heat
   of subterranean fires. There, snaking underground,
   they emit thick and continuous
   smoke, and sometimes flames, especially
   when the weather is wet, and with
   the further assistance of sulfurous and
   mineral waters. And when the heat is sufficient,
   the wood is browned, or somewhat
   scorched, and becomes like charcoal. If
   then, the earthen material is as yet unconverted
   into wood, these flames fire it, and
   it becomes like vases of terra cotta in a
   kiln, or like bricks. (12)

Rarefaction in a mine, as Galileo had described it, meant in effect that wood appeared to become much rarer, and sulfur or water was consumed in the explosive or fiery extraction of valuable metals or stones. Stelluti's officinae naturae, equipped with the same materials, simply reversed that process in a providential approximation of condensation: wood became more plentiful, charcoal and the eventual bricklike stone the substances from which it was removed. As if in recompense for the enormous expenditure of wood in the rarefaction of gunpowder, the fossil wood excavated and lit by Stelluti burned more slowly and intensely than "any other combustible material," remaining in flames for three days before turning to stone. Some of the specimens appeared to secrete an incenselike resin, as if here, too, Galileo's expectation of the hidden but necessary condensation of fragrant objects had been met; significantly, Stelluti compared them to a classic and visible instance of the process, noting that the wood "sweats just as do freshly painted walls in humid places." (13)

As Freedberg emphasizes, there is a curious reticence in Stelluti's treatise; this may, in fact, derive from the uneasy relationship of the argument to the suspect doctrine of classical atomism, too often associated with a universe in which the divine played no real role. A letter written around Easter 1633, shortly after Galileo's abjuration, suggests that the latter struck some as an ill-disguised atomist, for it relates that in the course of a friendly conversation, when Galileo blamed his own mind for not leading him beyond the supposition of a system filled with minute vacua, he provoked an outraged Sienese priest to claim that it was no longer carnival, where masquerades were acceptable, and that the scientist's show of humility was merely a mask for a crafty arrogance. (14) And the casual depiction of the minimum particles of fire in the Assayer, as is well known, had already led to Orazio Grassi's denunciation of him as an atomist or, at best, a fellow traveler of Epicurus, who, the Jesuit maintained, "had denied Divine Providence." (15) While Grassi's denunciation was immediately followed by the traditional argument about the rarefaction of explosives, Galileo's explanation of the phenomenon in 1634 returned promptly to that territory, being embedded in his discussion of interstitial vacua.

The Providential officinae naturae in which condensation takes place are, therefore, compatible with Galileo's version of atomism, and certain elements of Stelluti's treatise--most notably his depictions of metallic fragments and of underground fires--actually echo the descriptions of drawn gold and of heat "snaking among the minimum particles" and voids of various metals in Two New Sciences. Stelluti's list of the geometric shapes of the trunks he found has a peculiar affinity with the smooth, round, rough, and branched atoms celebrated by Lucretius, to the extent that it might indeed be argued that all that he had to say to the addressee of his treatise, Urban VIII's brother Francesco, Cardinal Barberini, about the "humble matters" of the fumaroles was an elaborate smoke screen for other more minute developments neither visible to the eye nor acceptable to ecclesiastical authorities.

And yet it is problematic to treat the subterranean world Stelluti described as a recognizable part of a continuum that began, as Galileo remarked in Two New Sciences, "along the road of those voids scattered around by a certain ancient philosopher." (16) An important element in the argument against petrified wood and for the subterranean trees supposedly generated by the earth was the issue of scale; in Two New Sciences Galileo had insisted several times that oversize trees could never have flourished as upright structures, as they would simply have fallen under the weight of their own branches. Unlike Basile's sheep-sized flea, objects could not always be scaled up or down, and the illusion of continuous magnification, suggested by the Linceans' frequent conflation of telescopes and microscopes, could not necessarily be maintained. The visible connections between the minimum particles of a body and its appearance to the naked eye, between its essence and surface, were fleeting or entirely absent.

Stelluti's "new and ambiguous" fossil woods flourish in this terrain, even as they signal the massive collapse of the Lincean project of scrutinizing, ordering, and depicting all on our planet in accordance with Galilean principles. The Eye of the Lynx is a splendid record of the magnificent work Galileo had done by others.

Notes

(1.) Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xiii.

(2.) Benedetto Castelli, "Discorso sopra la calamita," Bullettino di Bibliografia e di Studi delle Scienze Matematiche e Fisiche 16 (1883): 545-64, at 564, translation mine.

(3.) Galileo Galilei, Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari, in Opere, ed. Antonio Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: G. Barbera, 1968), vol. 5, 187-88, trans. Eileen Reeves and Albert van Helden, Galileo, Scheiner, and the Sunspot Controversy of 1612-1613 (forth-coming).

(4.) Giambattista Basile, Pentamerone, ed. Michele Rak (Milan: Garzanti, 1987), 108-9.

(5.) Nancy Canepa, From Court to Forest (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 50.

(6.) Basile (as in n. 4), 686-87.

(7.) Ibid., 822-23.

(8.) Lina Bolzoni, "Un modo di commentare alla fine dell'Umanesimo: I Commentaria del Campanella ai Poemata di Urbano VIII," Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 3rd series, 19, no. 1 (1989): 289-311.

(9.) John Milton, "Manso," in John Milton: Selections, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 146, verse 70, translation mine.

(10.) John Milton, Areopagitica, in Milton (as in n. 9), 259.

(11.) Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 64.

(12.) Francesco Stelluti. Traitato del legno fossile minerale (Rome: Vitale Mascardi. 1637), quoted in Freedberg, p. 336.

(13.) Stelluti (as in n. 12), 7, 9, translation mine.

(14.) Galileo (as in n. 3), vol. 15, 186.

(15.) Lothario Sarsi [Orazio Grassi S.J.], Ratio ponderum librae et simbellae, in Galileo (as in n. 3), vol. 6, 414.

](16.) Galileo (as in n. 11), 34.

EILEEN REEVES is associate professor of comparative literature at Princeton University [Department of Comparative Literature, 133 East Pyne, Princeton, N.J. 08544].

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