The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  Gilbert’s epochal discussion of terrestrial magnetism set off a train of theories and experiments. Famianus Strada, of the Society of Jesus, suggested telegraphy (1617) by proposing that two men might communicate through a distance by utilizing the sympathetic action of two magnetic needles made to point simultaneously to the same letter of the alphabet. Another Jesuit, Niccolo Cabeo (1629), gave the first known description of electrical repulsion. Still another, Athanasius Kircher, described in his Magnes (1641) a measurement of magnetism by suspending a magnet from one pan of a balance and counterpoising its influence by weights in the other. Descartes ascribed magnetism to the conflict of particles thrown off by the great vortex from which he believed the universe had evolved.

  Alchemy was still popular, especially as a royal substitute for debasing the currency. Emperor Rudolf II, the electors of Saxony, Brandenburg, and the Palatinate, the Duke of Brunswick, the Landgrave of Hesse, all engaged alchemists to manufacture silver or gold.46 From these experiments, from the needs of metallurgy and the dyeing industry, and from the emphasis of Paracelsus on chemical medicine, the science of chemistry was taking form. Andreas Libavius personified the transition. His Defense of Transmutatory Alchemy (1604) continued the old quest, but his Alchymia (1597) was the first systematic treatise on scientific chemistry. He discovered stannic chloride, was the first to make ammonium sulfate, was among the first to suggest blood transfusions as therapy. His laboratory at Coburg was one of the wonders of the city. Jan Baptista van Helmont, a wealthy nobleman who devoted himself to science and the medical service of the poor, placed his name among the founders of chemistry by distinguishing gases from air and analyzing their varieties and composition; he coined the word gas from the Greek chaos. He made many discoveries in his chosen field, ranging from the explosive gases of gunpowder to the inflammatory possibilities of human wind.47 He suggested the use of alkalis to correct undue acidity in the digestive tract. Johann Glauber recommended crystalline sodium sulfate as “a splendid medicine for internal and external use,” and “Glauber’s salt” is still used as an aperient. Both he and Helmont dabbled in alchemy.

  All these “natural sciences” shared in improving industrial production and martial slaughter. Technicians applied the new knowledge of movements and pressures in liquids and gases, the composition of forces, the laws of the pendulum, the course of projectiles, the refining of metals. Gunpowder was used in mine blasting (1613). In 1612 Simon Sturtevant devised a method of producing coke—i.e., “coking” (cooking or heating) bituminous coal to rid it of volatile ingredients; this coke was valuable in metallurgy, as the impurities in coal affected iron; it replaced charcoal and saved forests. The making of glass was cheapened, hence windowpanes became common in this age. Mechanical inventions multiplied as industry grew, for they were due less frequently to the researches of scientists than to the skill of artisans anxious to save time. So we first hear of the screw lathe in 1578, the knitting frame in 1589, the revolving stage in 1597, the threshing machine and the fountain pen in 1636.

  Engineers were accomplishing feats that even today would merit admiration. We have seen how Domenico Fontana aroused Rome by erecting an obelisk in St. Peter’s Square. Stevinus, as engineer for Maurice of Nassau, developed a system of sluices to control the dykes—guardian of the Dutch Republic. Giant bellows ventilated mines; complicated pumps raised water into towers to give pressure for houses and fountains in cities like Augsburg, Paris, and London. Truss bridges were built on the simple geometrical principle that a triangle cannot be deformed without changing the length of a side. In 1624 a submarine traveled two miles under water in the Thames.48 Jerome Cardan, Giambattista della Porta, and Salomon de Caus advanced the theory of the steam engine; Caus in 1615 described a machine for raising water by the expansive power of steam.49

  Geology was still unborn, even as a word; the study of the earth was called mineralogy, and respect for the Biblical story of Creation checked all ventures in cosmogony. Bernard Palissy was denounced as a heretic for reviving the ancient view that fossils were the petrified remains of dead organisms. Descartes ventured to suggest that the planets, including the earth, had once been glowing masses, like the sun, and that as the planet cooled it formed a crust of liquids and solids over a central fire, whose exhalations produced geysers, volcanoes, and earthquakes.50

  Geography progressed as missionaries, explorers, and merchants strove to extend their faith, their knowledge, or their sales. Spanish navigators (1567f explored the South Seas and discovered Guadalcanal and others of the Solomon Islands—so named in the hope of finding there Solomon’s mines. Pecho Paes, a Portuguese missionary, taken prisoner in Abyssinia (1588), visited the Blue Nile and solved an ancient riddle by showing that the periodic inundations of the Nile Valley were due to the rainy season in the Abyssinian highlands. Willem Janszoon was apparently the first European to touch Australia (1606), and Abel Tasman discovered Tasmania, New Zealand (1642), and the Fiji Islands (1643). Dutch traders entered Siam, Burma, and Indochina, but information about these countries and China came chiefly from Jesuit missionaries. Samuel Champlain, under orders of Henry IV of France, explored the coast of Nova Scotia and ascended the St. Lawrence River to the vicinity of Montreal. His followers founded Quebec and charted the lake that bears his name.

  The mapmakers struggled to keep not too far behind the explorers. Gerardus Mercator (Gerhard Kremer) studied at Louvain and established there a shop for making maps, scientific instruments, and celestial globes. In 1544 he was arrested and prosecuted for heresy, but escaped serious consequences; however, he thought it prudent to accept an invitation to the University of Duisburg, where he became cartographer to the Duke of Jülich-Cleves (1559). In his life of eighty-two years he labored tirelessly to map Flanders, Lorraine, Europe, the earth. His famous Nova et acuta terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium accomodata (1568) introduced the “Mercator’s projection” maps, which facilitated navigation by representing all meridians of longitude as parallel to one another, all parallels of latitude as straight lines, and both sets of lines at right angles to each other. In 1585 he began to issue his great Atlas (we owe this use of the word to him), containing fifty-one regional maps of unprecedented precision and accuracy, describing the whole earth as then known. His friend Abraham Oertel rivaled him with a comprehensive Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570). Together these men freed geography from its millennial bondage to Ptolemy and established it in its modern form. Because of them the Dutch maintained almost a monopoly on mapmaking for a century.

  V. SCIENCE AND LIFE

  Biology had still to wait two centuries for its heyday. Botany grew leisurely through medical studies of curative herbs and the importation of exotic plants into Europe. Jesuit missionaries brought in Peruvian bark (quinine), vanilla, and rhubarb. About 1560 the potato was introduced from Peru to Spain whence it spread across the Continent. Prospero Alpini, professor of botany at Padua, described fifty foreign plants newly cultivated in Europe. From his studies of the date palm he deduced the doctrine of sexual reproduction in plants, which Theophrastus had expressed in the third century B.C. “The female date trees,” said Alpini, “do not bear fruit unless the branches of the male and female plants are mixed together, or, as is generally done, unless the dust found in the male sheath or male flowers is sprinkled over the female flowers.”51 Linnaeus would later classify plants according to their mode of reproduction; but meanwhile (1583) Andrea Cesalpino of Florence offered the first systematic classification of plants—1,500 of them—on the basis of their different seeds and fruits. Gaspard Bauhin, of Basel, in his massive Pinax theatri botanici (1623), classified 6,000 plants, anticipating Linnaeus’ binomial nomenclature by genus and species. Bauhin devoted forty years to preparing this Table of the Botanic World, and he died a year after its publication. It remained for three centuries a standard text.

  The private herbariums of physicians were now evolving into botanical gardens maintained for the public by universities or governme
nts. The earliest, established at Pisa in 1543, achieved renown under Cesalpino; Zurich had one in 1560, then Bologna, Cassel, Leiden, Leipzig, Breslau, Basel, Heidelberg, Oxford. Gui de La Brosse, physician to Louis XIII, organized the famous Jardin des Plantes Médicinales at Paris in 1635. Zoological gardens, as menageries for public amusement, had existed in China (1100 B.C.), ancient Rome, and Aztec Mexico (c. 1450); modern forms were opened at Dresden in 1554 and under Louis XIII at Versailles.

  Zoology received less attention than botany, as it offered—except in mythical medicine—fewer cures. Ulisse Aldrovandi began in 1599 the publication of thirteen great tomes on “natural history”; he lived to see six through the press; the Senate of Bologna published the remaining seven from his manuscripts and at public cost; they were superseded only by the Histoire naturelle (1749–1804) of Buffon. The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher began histology with his Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646), in which he described the minute “worms” that his microscope had found in decaying substances. The belief in the spontaneous generation of tiny organisms out of rotten flesh—or even out of slime—was still almost universal, though Harvey was soon to reject it in his De generatione animalium (1651). Zoology was backward partly because only a few thinkers saw in animals the progenitors of men. But in 1632 Galileo wrote to the Grand Duke of Tuscany: “Though the differences between man and the other animals is enormous, one might say reasonably that it is little more than the difference among men themselves.”52 The modern mind was slowly climbing back to what the Greeks had known two thousand years before.

  Anatomy was resting after its labors under Vesalius. Dissection of cadavers was still opposed—as by Hugo Grotius53—but the numerous “anatomy lessons” in Dutch art reflect a general acceptance of the procedure. The great name here, as well as in surgery, is Girolamo Fabrizio d’Acquapendente, pupil of Fallopio and teacher of Harvey. During his reign at the University of Padua the great anatomical theater was built there—the only such structure still completely preserved from that era. His discovery of the valves in the veins and his studies of the effect of ligatures led to Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood. Knowledge of circulation of body fluids was advanced by Gasparo Aselli’s discovery of the lacteals (1632), lymphatic vessels carrying milklike chyle from the small intestine. Indeed, Aselli, despite his name (“the little ass”) described the circulation of the blood six years before Harvey published his theory. Andrea Cesalpino had expounded the essential theory in 1571, half a century before Harvey; he still clung to the old view that some blood passes through the septum of the heart, but he came closer than Harvey to explaining—by capillamenta—how the blood finds its way from the arteries to the veins. On a hundred fronts the noblest of all armies was advancing in the greatest of all wars.

  VI. SCIENCE AND HEALTH

  In that war for the conquest of knowledge the central battle is that of life against death—a battle which individually is always lost and collectively is regularly won. In fighting disease and pain the physicians and the hospitals had many human enemies: personal uncleanliness, public filth, noisome prisons, quacks with magical potions, “scientific” mystics, hernia setters, stone melters, cataract couchers, tooth drawers, amateur uroscopists. And new diseases ran a race with new cures.

  Leprosy had disappeared, and protective devices had reduced syphilis; Fallopio had invented (1564) a linen sheath against such infection. (This soon came to be used as a contraceptive and was sold by barbers and bawds.54) But epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, malaria, diphtheria, scurvy, influenza, smallpox, and dysentery appeared in several countries of Europe in this period, especially in Germany. Probably exaggerated figures report 4,000 deaths from a plague of boils in Basel in 1563–64; twenty-five per cent of the inhabitants of Freiburg-im-Breisgau carried off by plague in 1564; 9,000 in Rostock and 5,000 in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1565; 4,000 at Hanover and 6,000 at Brunswick in 1566.55 Terrified citizens ascribed some plagues to deliberate poisoning; at Frankenstein, in Silesia, seventeen persons were burned to death on suspicion of “strewing poison.”56 In 1604 the bubonic plague was so severe in Frankfurt am Main that there were not enough people to bury the dead.57 These are palpable exaggerations; but we are told, on good authority, that in a recurrence of the bubonic plague in Italy, 1629–31, Milan lost 86,000 and “no less than 500,000 died in the Venetian Republic…. Between 1630 and 1631 there were 1,000,000 victims of the plague in northern Italy alone.”58 The fertility of women barely kept up with the resourcefulness of death. Childbirth was made doubly painful by its frequent futility; two fifths of all children died before completing their second year.59 Families were large, populations were small.

  Public sanitation was improving, hospitals were multiplying. Medical education was taking a more rigorous form—though one could still practice medicine without a degree. Bologna, Padua, Basel, Leiden, Montpellier, Paris had famous medical schools drawing students from all Western Europe. We have a peculiar example of patient medical research in the thirty years of experiment by which Sanctorius tried to reduce physiological processes to quantitative measurement. He did much of his work while sitting at a table on a large scale; he recorded the changes in his weight from the intake and the outlet of solids and liquids, and he even weighed his sweat. He found that the human body gives off several pounds daily through normal perspiration, and concluded that this is a vital form of elimination. He invented a clinical thermometer (1612) and a pulsimeter as aids to diagnosis.

  Therapy was graduating from toads to leeches. Some reputable physicians prescribed dried toads, sewn in a bag and hung on the breast, as a trap to catch and absorb the poisonous air that surrounded the body in plague areas.60 Bloodletting by leeches or cupping was combined with plentiful drinking of water, on the theory that some of the intaken fluid would form fresh uninfected blood. Two schools of treatment contended for the victim: the iatromechanical, stemming from Descartes’ teaching that all bodily processes are mechanical; and the iatrochemical, originating with Paracelsus, developed by Helmont, and interpreting all physiology as chemical. Hydrotherapy was popular. Curative waters were taken at England’s Bath, the Netherlands’ Spa, France’s Plombières, and a dozen places along the Rhine and in Italy; we have seen Montaigne trying them and shedding stones on the way. New drugs like valerian (c. 1580), antimony (c. 1603), ipecac (1625), and quinine (1632) were introduced to Europe. The London pharmacopoeia of 1618 listed 1,960 drugs. Montaigne tells of special treats which a few doctors kept for patient patients:

  the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, an elephant’s dung, a mole’s liver, blood drawn from the right wing of a white pigeon, and, for us who have the stone … the pulverized droppings of a rat; and such other tomfooleries that are more suggestive of magic and spells than of a serious science.61

  Such delicacies were impressively expensive, and people in the seventeenth century moaned over druggists’ charges more than over doctors’ bills.62

  Dentistry was left to barbers and consisted almost entirely of extractions. The “barber-surgeons” now included skilled practitioners like Ambroise Paré, François Rousset, who revived the Caesarean section, and Gasparo Tagliacozzi, specialist in the plastic reconstruction of ears, noses, and lips. He was condemned by moralists for interfering with the handiwork of God; his corpse was exhumed from consecrated ground and was buried in unhallowed soil.63 Wilhelm Fabry, “father of German surgery,” was the first to recommend amputation of a limb above the diseased part; and Giovanni Colle of Padua gave the oldest known description of a blood transfusion (1628).

  As in every age, the patients resented the doctor’s fees; the comedians laughed at his long robe, red shoes, and bedside gravity. If we trust the satires of the comic dramatists, his social status was not much above that of the teacher; but when we note the history of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson we perceive a class of men holding a respected position in society and able to pay well for even a share in a great picture. And the most famous ph
ilosopher of the age, dreaming like all of us of a better future for mankind, thought of this as depending upon the improvement of human character, and of medical science as the likeliest agent of this basic revolution. “For even the mind,” said Descartes, “depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs that if it is possible to find some means by which men might commonly be made wiser and abler … I believe it is in medicine that it ought to be looked for.”64

  VII. FROM COPERNICUS TO KEPLER

  We have left astronomy to the last, for its heroes come toward the end of this period and constitute its pièces de résistance.

  The same Church that was to silence Galileo led the way in a major achievement of modern astronomy—the reform of the calendar. The revision that Sosigenes had made for Caesar about 46 B.C. had overestimated the year by eleven minutes and fourteen seconds; consequently, by 1577 the Julian calendar lagged behind the progress of the seasons by some twelve days, and ecclesiastical feasts had fallen out of the season for which they had been intended. Several attempts at calendar reform had been made—under Clement VI, Sixtus IV, and Leo X—but difficulties had been found in securing general agreement and requisite astronomical knowledge. In 1576 a revised calendar drawn up by Luigi Giglio was presented to Gregory XIII. The Pope submitted it to a commission of theologians, lawyers, and scientists, including the Bavarian Jesuit Christopher Clavius, famous in mathematics and astronomy; the final draft was apparently his work. Long negotiations were carried on with princes and prelates to secure their co-operation; many objections were made, and the effort to win the consent of the Eastern churches failed. On February 24, 1582, Gregory XIII signed the bull that established the Gregorian calendar in Roman-Catholic lands. To equate the old calendar with astronomic realities, ten days were to be omitted in October 1582, the fifth was to be accounted the fifteenth, and complicated allowances were to be made for the reckoning of interest and other commercial relations. To offset the error in the Julian calendar, only such century years as are divisible by 400 were to have a twenty-ninth day in February. Protestant nations resisted the change; in Frankfurt am Main and Bristol the populace rioted in the belief that the Pope wished to rob it of ten days; even Montaigne, avid of time, complained, “The eclipsing or abridging of ten days, which the Pope hath lately caused, hath taken me so low that I can hardly recover myself.”65 But slowly the new calendar—which would need no further correction for 3,333 years—won acceptance: by the German states in 1700, England in 1752, Sweden in 1753, Russia in 1918.III