Visual Surface and Visual Symbol: The Microscope and the Occult in Early Modern Science.
1988; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2709705
ISSN1086-3222
Autores Tópico(s)History of Science and Medicine
ResumoLike Vesalius's book of skeletons and muscle-men, Robert Hooke's collection of microscopical observations, the Micrographia of 1665, exercises a fascination which cannot be well accounted for by reference to its role in any direct or orderly line of scientific development. Indeed Hooke himself was to complain in 1691 that the microscope had almost gone out of service as a scientific instrument and had fallen into the hands of amateurs. Outside of Leeuwenhoek, he says, I hear of none that make any other Use of that Instrument, but for Diversion and Pastime, and that by reason it is become a portable Instrument, and easy to be carried in one's pocket. 1 Leeuwenhoek himself communicated no observations to the Royal Society, otherwise the major recipient of his letters between 1682 and 1691,2 and Hooke's own Discourse concerning Telescopes and Microscopes devotes approximately nine pages to the use and importance of the telescope as against two for the microscope. Most of those who formerly promoted these inquiries, he explains not too helpfully, gone off the stage; his own contemporaries are of the opinion that no more is left to be done, or that nothing can be done which will bring ready Money. 3 Reading the Micrographia is indeed diversion and pastime: the fine, geometrical rows of fish-scales, the tropical forest, and lunar flowersin fact the ordinary blue mold that grows on oranges-and Hooke's piece de resistance, the startling cancroid body-louse, reproduced on its own outsized fold-out, are as visually interesting to us as they must have been
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