Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie Page B

Hermes Trismegistus, and the ability of the weapon salve to heal wounds from a distance. Mersenne, remembered today for the prime numbers named after him, wrote that Fludd was “an evil magician, a doctor and propagator of foul and horrendous magic.” Gassendi had been a little more gracious. A devoutly pious priest, he happened to believe that everything was composed of basic units of matter called atoms—a material theory he got from his own ancient sources, Epicurus and Lucretius.
    On some of these topics, Kircher kept his mouth shut—on others, not as much. Fludd’s ideas were closer to his own than he might have been willing to admit. But after more than a decade of rigorous scholarship, Kircher could impress with his erudition, and his storytelling had a disarming effect on people. In the end, the skeptics were taken with him. “He has beautiful reports and beautiful secrets of nature,” Peiresc said in a letter. Kircher told them about his sunflower-seed clock, and it sounded “very marvelous” to Peiresc, who added: “He promises to show us proof.”
    As Kircher described it, the clock told time because the sunflower seed always turned toward the sun, the way the flowers do, by virtue of magnetic attraction. “And he says he has shown proof of it in good company at the dinner table, in the presence of the Elector of Mainz,” Peiresc wrote, “and even if one was in the house and out of the sunlight or if the sky was covered with clouds, the clock would never stop showing the most precise time, as much as is possible in the arc that the sun makes in our horizon. Even if it weren’t so exactly precise, and if it showed no other change than turning successively at sunrise or at noon or at sunset, more or less, I would still hold it as a great miracle of nature and one that well deserves to be seen.”
    Kircher may have intended the clock to suggest the degree to which invisible forces—of the kind that Fludd endorsed—were natural enough. But other implications weren’t lost on Peiresc. That same month, Galileo was standing trial in Rome. (His
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
had not only espoused the Copernican model but also made some fun of arguments for an Earth-centered universe and, at least it appeared, of the pope.) Peiresc understood that evidence of the sun’s magnetic action or attraction could help make the case for Earth’s rotation and revolution. After Kircher’s visit, Peiresc wrote about the sunflower-seed clock to Marin Mersenne in Paris, who wrote about it to, among others, René Descartes.
    â€œIf the experiment that you describe to me of a clock without sun is certain, it is quite curious, and I thank you for having written to me about it,” Descartes replied from Deventer in the Netherlands. “But I still have doubts about the effect; even so, I don’t judge it impossible.”
    Strangely, the original purpose of Kircher’s visit had to be postponed. When the time came to begin a discussion about hieroglyphics, it turned out that Kircher had failed to bring along the Barachias Nephi manuscript. This is probably because, to one degree or another, he’d exaggerated its very being. As historian Daniel Stolzenberg writes in his doctoral dissertation on Kircher’s Egyptological efforts, “No such author or text is known to exist.” Kircher didn’t make it up entirely—perhaps there was a compilation of old writings—but it wasn’t quite what he said it was.
    Kircher left with a trunk-load of books Peiresc had given him to help with his translation. In return, he promised to come back again to demonstrate the clock and to be sure to bring the manuscript with him when he did.
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    SOON AFTER RETURNING to Avignon, Kircher received a letter from the superior general of the Jesuits containing news about another reassignment. In his memoir, Kircher rendered