JF Ptak Science Books Post 2016
This is a Paper Microscope presentation of an 18th century image, presented in the form of an amalgamated 19th century microscope slide:
The presentation of the specimen is the detail as follows, from an engraving from 1788:
James Hutton explained this cross-section in iron-stone as a function of the internal heat of the Earth, “by means of fusion, or by congelation from a state of simple fluidity and expansion” as he wrote in 1788 (in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh)–now he may be explaining why this rock looks the way it does and getting at the root of his uniformitarianism, but what I see is a city plan.
Seeing things in stone like this was not terribly unusual, though seeing maps may well have been. One of our favorite Jesuits, the problematic Athanasius Kircher, saw cities in stone–except Fr. Kircher saw profiles of buildings more so than maps. Let’s make no mistake about it: Hutton did not see city maps, though Kircher did see buildings in his stones…and more.
For example exhibited an image of St. Jerome (in no less a place than the cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem!) that he found in agate. His Mundus Subterraneus (1661) is a home to a wide range of these objects: quadrupeds of all shapes and descriptions, human full-length portraits, hands with jewels, and even the Virgin Mary and child. As spectacular as these are there is always more: the magnificent cityscape (reproduced here) and the sublime discoveries of a full set of the alphabet and a series of 15 geometrical drawings, all naturally impressed in stone.
Then down in Arizona, near Silver City, there is another city in stone, the City of Rocks, a real collection of rocks but not a real city, these being the remnants of an ancinet volcano, place-keepers for the stuff that wasn’t there any longer, a hint of a great hulking mass, a sort of plan in their own way:
