The Lying Stones of Marrakech (9 page)

The waves and veins are not continuous, all following the same form, as in [vegetable] wood, but are shaped in a variety of ways—
some long and straight, others constricted, others thick, others contorted, others meandering…. This mineral wood takes its shape from the press of the surrounding earth, and thus it has waves of such varied form.

4. In the argument that he regarded as most decisive, Stelluti held that many specimens can be found in the process of transition, with some parts still made of formless earth, others petrified in the shapes of wood, and still others fully converted to wood. Stelluti views these stages as an actual sequence of transformation. He writes about a large specimen, exposed
in situ:

In a ditch, we discovered a long layer of this wood … rather barrel-shaped, with one segment made of pure earth, another of mixed earth and wood, and another of pure wood…. We may therefore call it earth-wood
(creta legno)
.

Later, he draws a smaller specimen (reproduced here from Stelluti's figure) and states:

The interior part is made of wood and metal together, but the crust on the outside seems to be made of lateritic substance, that is, of terra cotta, as we find in bricks.

5. In a closing (and conclusive) flourish for the empirical method, Stelluti reports the results of a supposed experiment done several years before:

A piece of damp earth was taken from the interior of a specimen of this wood, and placed in a room of the palace of Acquasparta, belonging to Duke Cesi. After several months it was found to be completely converted into wood—as seen, not without astonishment, by the aforementioned Lord, and by others who viewed it. And not a single person doubted that earth was the seed and mother of this wood [
la terra è seme e madre di questo legno
].

With twentieth-century hindsight, we can easily understand how Stelluti fell into error and read his story backward. His specimens are ordinary fossil wood, the remains of ancient plants. The actual sequence of transformation runs from real wood, to replacement of wood by percolating minerals (petrifaction), to earth that may either represent weathered and degraded petrified wood, or
may just be deposited around or inside the wood by flowing waters. In other words, Stelluti ran the sequence backward in his crucial fourth argument—from formless earth to metallophytes located somewhere between the mineral and vegetable kingdoms!

Moreover, Stelluti's criteria of shaping by overlying sediments (arguments 2 and 3) hold just as well for original wood later distorted and compressed, as for his reversed sequence of metallophytes actively growing within restricted spaces. Delicate parts fossilize only rarely, so the absence of leaves and stems, and the restriction of specimens to trunks, only records the usual pathways of preservation for ancient plants, not Stelluti's naive idea (argument 1) that the tree trunks cannot belong to the vegetable kingdom unless fossilized seeds or roots can also be found. As for the supposedly crucial experiment (argument 5)—well, what can we do with an undocumented three-hundred-year-old verbal report ranking only as hearsay even for Stelluti himself!

Nonetheless, Stelluti's treatise played an important role on the wrong side of the great debate about the nature of fossils—a major issue throughout seventeenth-century science, and not fully resolved until the mid-eighteenth century (see essay 1, about a late defense from 1726). Important authors throughout Europe, from Robert Plot in England (1677), to Olaus Worm in Denmark (1655), reported Stelluti's data as important support for the view that fossils can originate within the mineral kingdom and need not represent the remains of organisms. (Stelluti, by the way, did not confine his arguments to the wood of Acquasparta but made a general extrapolation to the nature and status of all fossils. In a closing argument, depicted on a fateful thirteenth plate of ammonites, Stelluti held that all fossils belong to the mineral kingdom and grow within rocks.)

When we evaluate the logic and rhetoric of Stelluti's arguments, one consistent strategy stands out. Stelluti had finally become a true disciple of Galileo and the primacy of direct empirical observation, viewed as inherently objective. Over and over again, Stelluti states that we must accept his conclusions because he has seen the phenomenon, often several times over many years, with his own eyes.

Stelluti had used this Galilean rhetoric to great advantage before. At the very bottom of his beautiful 1625 engraving of three bees for Pope Urban, Stelluti had added a little Latin note, just under his greatest enlargement of paired bee legs. In a phrase almost identical in form with Galileo's anagram about Saturn, Stelluti wrote:
Franciscus Stellutus Lynceus Fabr
^is
Microscopio Observavit
—“the Lynx Francesco Stelluti from [the town of] Fabriano observed [these objects]
with a microscope.” This time, at least, Stelluti had a leg up on Galileo—for the slow stepper among the Lynxes had made accurate observations, properly interpreted, while Galileo had failed for the much more difficult problem of Saturn. (This note, by the way, may represent the first appearance of the word
microscope
in print. Galileo had called his instrument an
occhiolino
, or “little eye,” and his fellow Lynxes had then suggested the modern name.)

But Stelluti's luck had run out with Cesi's wood, when the same claim now buttressed his errors. Consider a sampling, following the order of his text, of Stelluti's appeals to the incontrovertible status of direct observation:

The generation of this wood, which I have been able to see and observe so many times, does not proceed from seeds…

The material of this wood is nothing other than earth, because I have seen pieces of it [
perche n'ho veduto io pezzi
] with one part made of hard earth and the other of wood.

Figure 7 shows a drawing of a large oval specimen, which I excavated myself from the earth.

The outer surface of the other piece appears to be entirely in wood, as is evident to the eye [in the drawing presented by Stelluti].

Stelluti ends his treatise with a flourish in the same mode: he need not write at great length to justify his arguments (and his text only runs to twelve pages), because he has based his work on personal observation:

And this is all I need to say, with maximal brevity, about this material, which I have been able to see and observe so many times in those places where this new, rare, and marvelous phenomenon of nature originates.

But Stelluti had forgotten the old principle now embodied in a genre of jokes that begin by proclaiming: “I've got some good news, and some bad news.” Galileo's empirical method can work wonders. But hardly any faith can be more misleading than an unquestioned personal conviction that the apparent testimony of one's own eyes must provide a purely objective account, scarcely requiring any validation beyond the claim itself. Utterly unbiased
observation must rank as a primary myth and shibboleth of science, for we can only see what fits into our mental space, and all description includes interpretation as well as sensory reporting. Moreover, our mental spaces house a complex architecture built of social constraint, historical circumstance, and psychological hope—as well as nature's factuality, seen through a glass darkly.

We can be terribly fooled if we equate apparent sight with necessary physical reality. The great Galileo, the finest scientist of his or any other time,
knew
that Saturn—Stelluti's personal emblem—must be a triple star because he had so observed the farthest planet with good eyes and the best telescope of his day, but through a mind harboring no category for rings around a celestial sphere. Stelluti
knew
that fossil wood must grow from earths of the mineral kingdom because he had made good observations with his eyes and then ran an accurate sequence backward through his mind.

And thus, nature outfoxed the two Lynxes at a crucial claim in their careers—because both men concluded that sight alone should suffice, when genuine solutions demanded insight into mental structures and strictures as well.

As a final irony, Cesi had selected the emblem of Stelluti and Galileo's own society—the lynx—as an exemplar of this richer, dual pathway. The duke of Acquasparta had named his academy for a wild and wily cat, long honored in legend for possessing the sharpest sight among animals. Cesi chose well and subtly—and for a conscious and explicit reason. The maximal acuity of the lynx arose from two paired and complementary virtues—sharpness of vision
and
depth of insight, the outside and the inside, the eye and the mind.

Cesi had taken the emblem for his new society from the tide page of Giambattista Della Porta's
Natural Magic
(1589 edition), where the same picture of a lynx stands below the motto:
aspicit et inspirit
—literally meaning “he looks at and he looks into,” but metaphorically expressing the twinned ideals of observation and experimentation. Thus, the future fifth Lynx, the living vestige of the old way, had epitomized the richer path gained by combining insight with, if you will, “exsight,” or observation. Cesi had stated the ideal in a document of 1616, written to codify the rules and goals of the Lynxes:

In order to read this great, true and universal book of the world, it is necessary to visit all its parts, and to engage in both observation and experiment in order to reach, by these two good means, an acute and profound contemplation, by first representing things as they are and as they vary, and then by determining how we can change and vary them.

If we decide to embrace the entire universe as our potential domain of knowledge and insight—to use, in other words, the full range of scales revealed by Galileo's two great instruments, the telescope and the microscope (both, by the way, named by his fellow Lynxes)—we had better use all the tools of sensation
and
mentality that a few billion years of evolution have granted to our feeble bodies. The symbol of the lynx, who sees most acutely from the outside, but who also understands most deeply from the inside, remains our best guide. Stelluti himself expressed this richness, this duality, in a wonderfully poetic manner by extolling the lynx in his second major book, his translations of the poet Persius, published in 1630. Cesi had selected the lynx for its legendary acuity of vision, but Stelluti added:

Not merely of the exterior eyes, but also of the mind, so necessary for the contemplation of nature, as we have taught, and as we practice, in our quest to penetrate into the interior of things, to know the causes and operations of nature … just as the lynx, with its superior vision, not only sees what lies outside, but also notes what arises from inside.

1
The quotations from Galileo's
Letters on Sunspots
come from Stillman Drake's 1957 English translation, published by Anchor Books. I have translated all other quotes from the Italian of Stelluti's 1637 monograph on fossil wood, letters from several volumes of the
Edizione Naziottale
of Galileo's complete works, and three standard sources on the history of the Academy of the Lynxes:
Breve storia della Accademia dei Lineei
by D. Carutti (Rome: Salviucci, 1883);
Contributi alia storia della Accademia dei Lineei
by G. Gabrieli (Rome, 1989); and
L'Accademia dei Lineei e la cultura europea nel XVII secolo
, a catalog for a traveling exhibit about the Lynxes by A. M. Capecchi and several other authors, published in 1991.

W
E USUALLY DEPICT THE
R
ENAISSANCE (LITERALLY, THE
“rebirth”) as a clear, bubbling river of novelty that broke the medieval dam of rigidified scholasticism. But most participants in this great ferment cited the opposite of innovation as their motive. Renaissance thinkers and doers, as the name of their movement implied, looked backward, not forward, as they sought to rediscover and reinstitute the supposed perfection of intellect that Athens and Rome had achieved and a degraded Western culture had forgotten.

I doubt that anyone ever called Francis Bacon (1561–1626) a modest man. Nonetheless, even the muse of ambition must have smiled at such an audacious gesture when this most important British philosopher since the death of William of Ockham in 1347, his chancellor of England (until his fall for financial improprieties),
declared “all knowledge” as his “province” and announced that he would write a Great Instauration(defined by
Webster's
as “a restoration after decay, lapse or dilapidation”),both to codify the fruitful rules of reason and to summarize all useful results. As a procedural starting point at the dawn of a movement that would become modern science, Bacon rejected both the scholastic view that equated knowledge with conservation, and the Renaissance reform that sought to recapture a long-lost perfection. Natural knowledge, he proclaimed, must be reconceptualized as a cumulative process of discovery, propelled by processing sensory data about the external world through the reasoning powers of the human brain.

Aristotle's writings on logic had been gathered into a compendium called the
Organon
(or “tool”).Bacon,with his usual flair, entitled the second book of his great instauration the
Novum Organum
,or new tool of reasoning—because the shift to such a different ideal of knowledge as cumulative, and rooted in an increasing understanding of external reality, also demanded that the logic of reasoning itself be reexamined. Bacon therefore began the
Novum Organum
by analyzing impediments to our acquisition of accurate knowledge about the empirical world. Recognizing the existence of such barriers required no novel insight. Aristotle himself had classified the common logical fallacies of human reasoning, while everyone acknowledged the external limits of missing data—stars too far away to study in detail (even with Galileo's newfangled telescope),or cities too long gone to leave any trace of their former existence.