drebbel's living instruments, hartmann's microcosm, and libavius's ...

DREBBEL’S LIVING INSTRUMENTS · 49translation of Drebbel’s On the nature of the elements (see Appendix). Kircher entitledthis section the magnetic theory of the elements; it was magnetic since the elementsattracted each other with great force and required each other to live. Fire, for instance,sucked air towards it, becoming hotter with more air, but dying when deprived ofit. Kircher followed this theoretical section with a series of experiments proving histheory. In Drebbel’s original, this would have been the retort demonstration, showingthe mutual transformation, attraction, and movement of air, water, and fire. Kircherreplaced the retort demonstration with a thermoscope.In the motion of the water upwards through heat and downwards through coldhides a wonderful secret of nature, namely the entire motion of the universe, he said.Kircher, like Fludd, designed the thermoscope as an archetype of the world, with itsvarious sections consigned to various temperaments, winds, and air qualities of theworld. 51 He described how the thermoscope displayed an analogy with the magnetsince the southern heat of the sun pushed the liquid away from the southern tip ofthe thermoscope, just as the southern tips of magnets repelled each other. Yet, askedKircher, was this elementary force truly magnetic, as so many stubbornly claimed? 52Even a friend of Kircher’s, a not unknown philosopher (“haud ignobilis Philosophus”),had written to him concerning this “magnetic” movement.Kircher did not name his friend, but this person was most likely Nicholas Cabeus,S.J., who in his Magnetic philosophy of 1629 had described the magnetic movementof the thermoscope. Cabeus related the opinion of another person, who absolutelydeclared this motion to be that of an animate object; this person had been an eyewitnessof the liquid “a certain Englishman” had sublimated and placed in a glass,where it perpetually fluctuated, during the time of Rudolf II. 53 Despite the brevity ofDrebbel’s stay in Prague, eye-witnesses there did have the chance to observe his glassshowing the motion of the tides. 54 Cabeus denied that the motion was animate, sincewhen he talked to other eyewitnesses, he discovered that it was due to the alterationof the “inconstant air”, according to the same phenomenon by which everyone “herein Italy in the past few years has been able to measure the degree of cold”.Yet the fact that this instrument had become common should not make it any theless significant, said Cabeus. Indeed, he went on to argue that the motion witnessed inthe thermometer, while not quite at the level of life, was not as simple as unidirectionalgravity or levity. Mathematicians and Aristotle agreed, said Cabeus, on three possibledirections of movement. The movement of the elements was only monodirectional,but living objects could move in all three directions. Cabeus, went on, however, todefine a new, median type of bidirectional magnetic movement witnessed in thethermometer which intervened between the simple elements and living things. 55We have slowly peeled back several layers of interpretation. Some eye-witnessesunderstood the cosmoscope as a “living instrument”. Cabeus re-interpreted itsmovement as a median, magnetic motion intervening between life and the simplemovements of the elements. Kircher, while lifting pages from Drebbel’s On thenature of the elements and calling it a “magnetic” theory of the elements, denied thatthe movement was truly magnetic, much less animate. Yet even the compromising