JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1353

I wrote about Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterreaneus (1664) a few days ago (in “Birds With Stone Wings”, here and elsewhere), particularly staying within the first section of the eight book of Mundus, De Lapidibus, in which he investigated stones, gems, fossils and then “found figures” in agates. 

Kircher did not believe that finding these symbols in stone were a direct consequence of any supreme anything, recognizing that they were formed and collected by chance. He did formulate some interesting and early and sometimes-correct observations on the evolution of languages, but was entirely constrained by the authentic history as presented in the early books of the Bible.  While recognizing that languages of a certain region are or could be relational, and that the Romance languages were a corruption of Latin and that there was a  Semitic and Graeco-Latin connection, they were all necessarily descendants of Hebrew, which was the language given by the creator to man, mystical symbols handed down from Heaven to Adam.  And so it goes–I guess that you can only take so far as imposed limits like that allow.  Horizon Aeternitatis.

[The original image is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.]

And in detail:

And then of course the stone-found geometrical figures:

  These engravings of the originals in Kircher’s cabinets of curiosities did take some sharp-eyed sleuthing and gathering.