Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  —NED WARD, The Vertuoso’s Club

  AUGUST 12. AT A MEETING of the SOCIETY,

  MR. NICHOLAS MERCATOR and MR. JOHN LOCKE were elected and admitted.

  The rest of Mr. BOYLE’s experiments about light were read, with great satisfaction to the society; who ordered, that all should be registered, and that Mr. HOOKE should take care of having the like experiments tried before the society, as soon as he could procure any shining rotten wood or fish.

  Dr. CROUNE brought in a dead parakeet.

  Sir JOHN FINCH displayed an asbestos hat-band.

  Dr. ENT speculated as to why it is hotter in summer than winter.

  Mr. POWELL offered to be employed by the society in any capacity whatever.

  Mr. OLDENBURG being absent, Mr. WATERHOUSE read a letter from a PORTUGUESE nobleman, most civilly complimenting the society for its successes in removing the spleens of dogs, without ill effect; and going on to enquire, whether the society might undertake to perform the like operation on his Wife, as she was most afflicted with splenetic distempers.

  Dr. ENT was put in mind of an account concerning oysters.

  Mr. HOOKE displayed an invention for testing whether a surface is level, consisting of a bubble of air trapped in a sealed glass tube, otherwise filled with water.

  The Dog, that had a piece of his skin cut off at the former meeting, being enquired after, and the operator answering, that he had run away, it was ordered, that another should be provided against the next meeting for the grafting experiment.

  The president produced from Sir WILLIAM CURTIUS a hairy ball found in the belly of a cow.

  THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET produced a letter of Mons. HUYGENS, dated at Paris, mentioning a new observation concerning Saturn, made last spring at Rome by one CAMPANI, viz. that the circle of Saturn had been seen to cast a shadow on the sphere: which observation Mons. HUYGENS looked on as confirming his hypothesis, that Saturn is surrounded by a Ring.

  A Vagabond presented himself, who had formerly received a shot into his belly, breaking his guts in two: whereupon one end of the colon stood out at the left side of his belly, whereby he voided all his excrement, which he did for the society.

  Mr. POVEY presented a skeleton to the society.

  Mr. BOYLE reported that swallows live under frozen water in the Baltic.

  Dr. GODDARD mentioned that wainscotted rooms make cracking noises in mornings and evenings.

  Mr. WALLER mentioned that toads come out in moist cool weather.

  Mr. HOOKE related, that he had found the stars in Orion’s belt, which Mons. HUYGENS made but three, to be five.

  Dr. MERRET produced a paper, wherein he mentioned, that three skulls with the hair on and brains in them were lately found at Black-friars in pewter vessels in the midst of a thick stone-wall, with certain obscure inscriptions. This paper was ordered to be registered.

  Mr. HOOKE made an experiment to discover, whether a piece of steel first counterpoised in exact scales, and then touched by a vigorous magnet, acquires thereby any sensible increase in weight. The event was, that it did not.

  Dr. ALLEN gave an account of a person, who had lately lost a quantity of his brain, and yet lived and was well.

  Dr. WILKINS presented the society with his book, intitled, An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language.

  Mr. HOOKE suggested, that it was worth inquiry, whether there were any valves in plants, which he conceived to be very necessary for the conveying of the juices of trees up to the height of sometimes 200, 300, and more feet; which he saw not how it was possible to be performed without valves as well as motion.

  Sir ROBERT SOUTHWELL presented for the repository a skull of an executed person with the moss grown on it in Ireland.

  THE BISHOP OF CHESTER moved, that Mr. HOOKE might be ordered to try, whether he could by means of the microscopic moss-seed formerly shewn by him, make moss grow on a dead man’s skull.

  Mr. HOOKE intimated that the experiment proposed by THE BISHOP OF CHESTER would not be as productive of new Knowledge, as a great many others that could be mentioned, if there were time enough to mention them all.

  Mr. OLDENBURG being absent, Mr. WATERHOUSE read an extract, which the former had received from Paris, signifying that it was most certain, that Dr. DE GRAAF had unravelled testicles, and that one of them was kept by him in spirit of wine. Some of the physicians present intimating, that the like had been attempted in England many years before, but not with that success, that they could yet believe what Dr. DE GRAAF affirmed.

  THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET gave of Dr. DE GRAAF an excellent Character; attesting that, while at Paris, this same Doctor had cured the Duke’s son (now the EARL OF UPNOR) of the bite of a venomous spyder.

  Occasion being given to speak of tarantulas, some of the members said, that persons bitten by them, though cured, yet must dance once a year: others, that different patients required different airs to make them dance, according to the different sorts of tarantulas which had bitten them.

  THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET said, that the Spyder that had bitten his son in Paris, was not of the tarantula sort, and accordingly that the Earl does not under any account suffer any compulsion to dance.

  The society gave order for the making of portable barometers, contrived by Mr. BOYLE, to be sent into several parts of the world, not only into the most distant places of England, but likewise by sea into the East and West Indies, and other parts, particularly to the English plantations in Bermuda, Jamaica, Barbados, Virginia, and New England; and to Tangier, Moscow, St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, and Scanderoon.

  Dr. KING was put in mind of dissecting a lobster and an oyster.

  Mr. HOOKE produced some plano-convex spherical glasses, as small as pin-heads, to serve for object-glasses in microscopes. He was desired to put some of them into the society’s great microscope for a trial.

  THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET produced the skin of a Moor tanned.

  Mr. BOYLE remarked, that two very able physicians of his acquaintance gave to a woman desperately sick of the iliac passion above a pound of crude quicksilver which remained several days in her body without producing any fatal symptom; and afterwards dissecting the dead corpse, they found, that part of her gut, where the excrement was stopped, gangrened; but the quicksilver lay all on a heap above it, and had not so much as discoloured the parts of the gut contiguous to it.

  Mr. HOOKE was put in mind of an experiment of making a body heavier than gold, by putting quicksilver to it, to see, whether any of it would penetrate into the pores of gold.

  Dr. CLARKE proposed, that a man hanged might be begged of the King, to try to revive him; and that in case he were revived, he might have his life granted him.

  Mr. WATERHOUSE produced a new telescope, invented by Mr. Isaac NEWTON, professor of mathematics in the university of Cambridge, improving on previous telescopes by contracting the optical path. THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET, Dr. CHRISTOPHER WREN, and Mr. HOOKE, examining it, had so good opinion of it, that they proposed it be shown to the King, and that a description and scheme of it should be sent to Mons. HUYGENS at Paris, thereby to secure this invention to Mr. NEWTON.

  The experiment of the opening of the thorax of a dog was suggested. Mr. HOOKE and Mr. WATERHOUSE having made this experiment formerly, begged to be excused for the duration of any such proceedings. Dr. BALLE and Dr. KING made the experiment but did not succeed.

  A fifth Cabal, perhaps, would be a Knot of Mathematicians, who would sit so long wrangling about squaring the Circle, till, with Drinking and Rattling, they were ready to let fall a nauseous Perpendicular from their Mouths to the Chamber-Pot. Another little Party would be deeply engaged in a learned Dispute about Transmutation of Metals, and contend so warmly about turning Lead into Gold, till the Bar had a just Claim to all the Silver in their Pockets…

  —NED WARD, The Vertuoso’s Club

  A FEW OF THEM ENDED UP at a tavern, unfortunately called the Dogg, on Broad Street near London Wall. Wilkins (who was the Bishop of Chester now) a
nd Sir Winston Churchill and Thomas More Anglesey, a.k.a. the Duke of Gunfleet, amused themselves using Newton’s telescope to peer into the windows of the Navy Treasury across the way, where lamps were burning and clerks were working late. Wheelbarrows laden with lockboxes were coming up every few minutes from the goldsmiths’ shops on Thread-needle.

  Hooke commandeered a small table, set his bubble-level upon it, and began to adjust it by inserting scraps of paper beneath its legs. Daniel quaffed bitters and thought that this was all a great improvement on this morning.

  “To Oldenburg,” someone said, and even Hooke raised his head up on its bent neck and drank to the Secretary’s health.

  “Are we allowed to know why the King put him in the Tower?” asked Daniel.

  Hooke suddenly became absorbed in table-levelling, the others in viewing a planet that was rising over Bishopsgate, and Daniel reckoned that the reason for Oldenburg’s imprisonment was one of those things that everyone in London should simply know, it was one of those facts Londoners breathed in like the smoke of sea-coal.

  John Wilkins brushed significantly past Daniel and stepped outside, plucking a pipe from a tobacco-box on the wall. Daniel joined him for a smoke on the street. It was a fine summer eve in Bishopsgate: on the far side of London Wall, lunaticks at Bedlam were carrying on vigorous disputes with angels, demons, or the spirits of departed relations, and on this side, the rhythmic yelping of a bone-saw came through a half-open window of Gresham’s College as a cabal of Bishops, Knights, Doctors, and Colonels removed the rib-cage from a living mongrel. The Dogg’s sign creaked above in a mild river-breeze. Coins clinked dimly inside the Navy’s lockboxes as porters worried them up stairs. Through an open window they could occasionally glimpse Samuel Pepys, Fellow of the Royal Society, making arrangements with his staff and gazing out the window, longingly, at the Dogg. Daniel and the Bishop stood there and took it in for a minute as a sort of ritual, as Papists cross themselves when entering a church: to do proper respect to the place.

  “Mr. Oldenburg is the heart of the R.S.,” Bishop Wilkins began.

  “I would give that honor to you, or perhaps Mr. Hooke…”

  “Hold—I was not finished—I was launching a metaphor. Please remember that I’ve been preaching to rapt congregations, or at least they are pretending to be rapt—in any case, they sit quietly while I develop my metaphors.”

  “I beg forgiveness, and am now pretending to be rapt.”

  “Very well. Now! As we have learned by doing appalling things to stray dogs, the heart accepts blood returning from organs, such as the brain, through veins, such as the jugular. It expels blood toward these organs through arteries, such as the carotid. Do you remember what happened when Mr. Hooke cross-plumbed the mastiff, and connected his jugular to his carotid? And don’t tell me that the splice broke and sprayed blood all around—this I remember.”

  “The blood settled into a condition of equilibrium, and began to coagulate in the tube.”

  “And from this we concluded that—?”

  “I have long since forgotten. That bypassing the heart is a bad idea?”

  “One might conclude,” said the Bishop helpfully, “that an inert vessel, that merely accepts the circulating Fluid, but never expels it, becomes a stagnant back-water—or to put it otherwise, that the heart, by forcing it outwards, drives it around the cycle that in good time brings it back in from the organs and extremities. Hallo, Mr. Pepys!” (Shifting his focus to across the way.) “Starting a war, are we?”

  “Too easy…winding one up, my lord,” from the window.

  “Is it going to be finished any time soon? Your diligence is setting an example for all of us—stop it!”

  “I detect the beginnings of a lull…”

  “Now, Daniel, anyone who scans the History of the Royal Society can see that, at each meeting, Mr. Oldenburg reads several letters from Continental savants, such as Mr. Huygens, and, lately, Dr. Leibniz…”

  “I’m not familiar with that name.”

  “You will be—he is a mad letter-writer and a protégé of Huygens—a devotee of Pansophism—he has lately been smothering us with curious documents. You haven’t heard about him because Mr. Oldenburg has been passing his missives round to Mr. Hooke, Mr. Boyle, Mr. Barrow, and others, trying to find someone who can even read them, as a first step towards determining whether or not they are nonsense. But I digress. For every letter Mr. Oldenburg reads, he receives a dozen—why so many?”

  “Because, like a heart, he pumps so many outwards—?”

  “Yes, precisely. Whole sacks of them crossing the Channel—driving the circulation that brings new ideas, from the Continent, back to our little meetings.”

  “Damn me, and now the King’s clapped him in the Tower!” said Daniel, unable to avoid feeling a touch melodramatic—this kind of dialog not being, exactly, his metier.

  “Bypassing the heart,” said Wilkins, without a trace of any such self-consciousness. “I can already feel the Royal Society coagulating. Thank you for bringing Mr. Newton’s telescope. Fresh blood! When can we see him at a meeting?”

  “Probably never, as long as the Fellows persist in cutting up dogs.”

  “Ah—he’s squeamish—abhors cruelty?”

  “Cruelty to animals.”

  “Some Fellows have proposed that we borrow residents of…” said the Bishop, nodding towards Bedlam.

  “Isaac might be more comfortable with that,” Daniel admitted.

  A barmaid had been hovering, and now stepped into the awkward silence: “Mr. Hooke requests your presence.”

  “Thank God,” Wilkins said to her, “I was afraid you were going to complain he had committed an offense against your person.”

  The patrons of the Dogg were backed up against the walls in the configuration normally used for watching bar-fights, viz. forming an empty circle around Mr. Hooke’s table, which was (as shown by the bubble instrument) now perfectly level. It was also clean, and empty except for a glob of quicksilver in the middle, with numerous pinhead-sized droplets scattered about in novel constellations. Mr. Hooke was peering at the large glob—a perfect, regular dome—through an optical device of his own manufacture. Glancing up, he twiddled a hog-bristle between thumb and index finger, pushing an invisibly tiny droplet of mercury across the table until it merged with the large one. Then more peering. Then, moving with the stealth of a cat-burglar, he backed away from the table. When he had put a good fathom between himself and the experiment, he looked up at Wilkins and said, “Universal Measure!”

  “What!? Sir! You don’t say!”

  “You will agree,” Hooke said, “that level is an absolute concept—any sentient person can make a surface level.”

  “It is in the Philosophical Language,” said Bishop Wilkins—this signified yes.

  Pepys came in the door, looking splendid, and had his mouth open to demand beer, when he realized a solemn ceremony was underway.

  “Likewise mercury is the same in all places—in all worlds.”

  “Agreed.”

  “As is the number two.”

  “Of course.”

  “Here I have created a flat, clean, smooth, level surface. On it I have placed a drop of mercury and adjusted it so that the diameter is exactly two times its height. Anyone, anywhere could repeat these steps—the result would be a drop of mercury exactly the same size as this one. The diameter of the drop, then, can be used as the common unit of measurement for the Philosophical Language!”

  The sound of men thinking.

  Pepys: “Then you could build a container that was a certain number of those units high, wide, and deep; fill it with water; and have a standard measure of weight.”

  “Just so, Mr. Pepys.”

  “From length and weight you could make a standard pendulum—the time of its alternations would provide a universal unit of time!”

  “But water beads up differently on different surfaces,” said the Bishop of Chester. “I assume the same sorts of variations oc
cur with mercury.”

  Hooke, resentful: “The surface to be used could be stipulated: copper, or glass…”

  “If the force of gravity varies with altitude, how would that affect the height of the drop?” asked Daniel Waterhouse.

  “Do it at sea-level,” said Hooke, with a dollop of spleen.

  “Sea-level varies with the tides,” Pepys pointed out.

  “What of other planets?” Wilkins demanded thunderously.

  “Other planets!? We haven’t finished with this one!”

  “As our compatriot Mr. Oldenburg has said: ‘You will please to remember that we have taken to task the whole Universe, and that we were obliged to do so by the nature of our Design!’ ”

  Hooke, very stormy-looking now, scraped most of the quicksilver into a funnel, and thence into a flask; departed; and was sighted by Mr. Pepys (peering through the Newtonian reflector) no more than a minute later, stalking off towards Hounsditch in the company of a whore. “He’s flown into one of his Fits of Melancholy—we won’t see him for two weeks now—then we’ll have to reprimand him,” Wilkins grumbled.

  Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together—that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them. But they could not all break free at once: Churchill and others wanted more details from Daniel about this Mr. Newton and his telescope. The Duke of Gun-fleet got Pepys cornered, and interrogated him about dark matters concerning the Navy’s finances. Blood-spattered, dejected Royal Society members stumbled in from Gresham’s College, with the news that Drs. King and Belle had gotten lost in the wilderness of canine anatomy, the dog had died, and they really needed Hooke—where was he? Then they cornered Bishop Wilkins and talked Royal Society politics—would Comstock stand for election to President again? Would Anglesey arrange to have himself nominated?