-NEDWARD,The Vertuoso’s Club
AFEW 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) and 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 Threadneedle.
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 protege 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!”