in the Earth: BURYING ALIVE
in water: DROWNING
in fire: BURNING ALIVE
at theThroat
by weight of a man’s own body: HANGING
by the strength of others: STRANGLING, throttle, choke, suffocate
MIXEDOF WOUNDING AND STARVING; THE BODY BEING
Erect : CRUCIFYING
Lying on a Wheel : BREAKING ON THE WHEEL
according to theGeneral name; signifying great pain: TORTURE according to special kinds:
byStriking;
with a limber instrument: WHIPPING, lashing, scourging, leashing, rod, slash, switch, stripe, Beadle
with a stiff instrument: CUDGELLING, bastinado, baste,
swinge, swaddle, shrubb, slapp, thwack;
byStretching of the limbs violently;
the body being laid along: RACK
the body lifted up into the Air: STRAPPADO
LIBERTY;OF WHICH ONE IS DEPRIVED, BY
into
a place: IMPRISONMENT, Incarceration, Durance, Custody, Ward,
clap up, commit, confine, mure, Pound, Pinfold, Gaol, Cage, Set fast
anInstrument: BONDS, fetters, gyves, shackles, manicles,
pinion, chains.
Out of a place or country, whether
with allowance of any other: EXILE, banishment
confinement to one other: RELEGATION
Repute, whether
more gently: INFAMIZATION, Ignominy, Pillory
more severely by burning marks in one’s flesh: STIGMATIZATION, Branding, Cauterizing
Estate; whether
in part: MULCT, fine, sconce
in whole: CONFISCATION, forfeiture
Dignity and power;by depriving one of
his degree: DEGRADING, deposing, depriving
his capacity to bear office: INCAPACITATING, cashier, disable,
discard, depose, disfranchize.
As Daniel scourged, bastinadoed, racked, and strappadoed his mind, trying to think of punishments that he and Wilkins had missed, he heard Hooke striking sparks with flint and steel, and went down to investigate.
Hooke was aiming the sparks at a blank sheet of paper. “Mark where they strike,” he said to Daniel. Daniel hovered with a pen, and whenever an especially large spark hit the paper, he drew a tight circle around it. They examined the paper under the Microscope, and found, in the center of each circle, a remnant: a more or less complete hollow sphere of what was obviously steel. “You see that the Alchemists’ conception of heat is ludicrous,” Hooke said. “There is no Element of Fire. Heat is really nothing more than a brisk agitation of the parts of a body-hit a piece of steel with a rock hard enough, and a bit of steel is torn away-”
“And that is the spark?”
“That is the spark.”
“But why does the spark emit light?”
“The force of the impact agitates its parts so vehemently that it becomes hot enough to melt.”
“Yes, but if your hypothesis is correct-if there is no Element of Fire, only a jostling of internal parts-then why should hot things emit light?”
“I believe that light consists of vibrations. If the parts move violently enough, they emit light-just as a struck bell vibrates to produce sound.”
Daniel supposed that was all there was to that, until he went with Hooke to collect samples of river insects one day, and they squatted in a place where a brook tumbled over the brink of a rock into a little pool. Bubbles of water, forced beneath the pool by the falling water, rose to the surface: millions of tiny spheres. Hooke noticed it, pondered for a few moments, and said: “Planets and stars are spheres, for the same reason that bubbles and sparks are.”
“What!?”
“A body of fluid, surrounded by some different fluid, forms into a sphere.Thus: air surrounded by water makes a sphere, which we call a bubble. A tiny bit of molten steel surrounded by air makes a sphere, which we call a spark. Molten earth surrounded by the C?lestial ?ther makes a sphere, which we call a planet.”
And on the way back, as they were watching a crescent moon chase the sun below the horizon, Hooke said, “If we could make sparks, or flashes of light, bright enough, we could see their light reflected off the shadowed part of that moon later, and reckon the speed of light.”
“If we did it with gunpowder,” Daniel reflected, “John Comstock would be happy to underwrite the experiment.”
Hooke turned and regarded him for a few moments with a cold eye, as if trying to establish whether Daniel, too, was made up out of cells. “You are thinking like a courtier,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice; he was stating, not an opinion, but a fact.
The chief Design of the aforementioned Club, was to propagate new Whims, advance mechanic Exercises, and to promote useless, as well as useful Experiments. In order to carry on this commendable Undertaking, any frantic Artist, chemical Operator, or whimsical Projector, that had but a Crotchet in their Heads, or but dream’d themselves into some strange fanciful Discovery, might be kindly admitted, as welcome Brethren, into this teeming Society, where each Member was respected, not according to his Quality, but the searches he had made into the Mysteries of Nature, and the Novelties, though Trifles, that were owing to his Invention: So that a Mad-man, who had beggar’d himself by his Bellows and his Furnaces, in a vain pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone; or the crazy Physician who had wasted his Patrimony, by endeavouring to recover that infallible Nostrum, Sal Graminis, from the dust and ashes of a burnt Hay-cock, were as much reverenc’d here, as those mechanic Quality, who, to shew themselves Vertuoso’s, would sit turning of Ivory above in their Garrets, whilst their Ladies below Stairs, by the help of their He-Cousins, were providing Horns for their Families.
-NEDWARD,The Vertuoso’s Club
THE LEAVES WERE TURNING,the Plague in London was worse. Eight thousand people died in a week. A few miles away in Epsom, Wilkins had finished the Ark digression and begun to draw up a grammar, and a system of writing, for his Philosophical Language. Daniel was finishing some odds and ends, viz. Nautical Objects: Seams and Spurkets, Parrels and Jears, Brales and Bunt-Lines. His mind wandered.
Below him, a strange plucking sound, like a man endlessly tuning a lute. He went down stairs and found Hooke sitting there with a few inches of quill sticking out of his ear, plucking a string stretched over a wooden box. It was far from the strangest thing Hooke had ever done, so Daniel went to work for a time, trying to dissolve Wilkins’s bladder-gravel in various potions. Hooke continued plucking and humming. Finally Daniel went over to investigate.
A housefly was perched on the end of the quill that was stuck in Hooke’s ear. Daniel tried to shoo it away. Its wings blurred, but it didn’t move. Looking more closely Daniel saw that it had been glued down.