The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick

became a Bull-Dog , and the Bull-Dog a Spaniel .” He had even tried a blood transfusion between a sheep and a madman. The sheep died, but the madman survived and thrived, except that “he bleated perpetually, and chew’d the Cud, and had Wool growing on him in great Quantities.”
    Like his king, Shadwell found much to satirize in the virtuosos’ fascination with the properties of air. Sir Nicholas keeps a kind of wine cellar with bottles holding air collected from all over. His assistants have crossed the globe “bottling up Air, and weighing it in all Places, sealing the Bottles Hermetically.” Air from Tenerife is the lightest, that from the Isle of Dogs heaviest. Shadwell had great fun with the notion that air is a substance, with properties, rather than a mere absence. “Let me tell you, Gentlemen,” Sir Nicholas assures his visitors, “Air is but a thinner sort of Liquor, and drinks much the better for being bottled.”
    Shadwell had a good number of allies among the satirists of his day, many of them eminent. Samuel Butler lampooned men who spent their time staring into microscopes at fleas and drops of pond water and contemplating such mysteries as “How many different Species / Of Maggots breed in rotten Cheeses.”
    But no one brought as much talent to ridiculing science as Jonathan Swift. Even writing more than half a century after the founding of the Royal Society, in Gulliver’s Travels , Swift quivered with indignation at scientists for their pretension and impracticality. (Swift visited the Royal Society in 1710, squeezing in his visit between a trip to the insane asylum at Bedlam and a visit to a puppet show.)
    Gulliver observes one ludicrous project after another. He sees men working on “softening Marble for Pillows and Pincushions” and an inventor engaged in “an Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food.” In many places, the satire targets actual Royal Society experiments. Real scientists had struggled in vain, for instance, to sort out the mysterious process that would later be called photosynthesis. How do plants manage to grow by “eating” sunlight? 19 Gulliver meets a man who “had been Eight Years upon a project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put into Vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the Air in raw inclement Summers.”
    Swift’s sages live in the expectation that soon “one Man shall do the Work of Ten and a Palace may be built in a Week,” but none of the high hopes ever pans out. “In the mean time, the whole Country lies miserably waste, the Houses in Ruins, and the People without Food or Cloaths.”
    Mathematicians, the very emblem of head-in-the-clouds uselessness, come in for extra ridicule. So absentminded are they that they need to be rapped on the mouth by their servants to remember to speak. Lost in thought, they fall down the stairs and walk into doors. They can think of nothing but mathematics and music. Even meals feature such mathematical courses as “a Shoulder of Mutton, cut into an Equilateral Triangle; a Piece of Beef into a Rhomboides; and a Pudding into a Cycloid.”
    In hardheaded England, where “practicality” and “common sense” were celebrated as among the highest virtues, Swift’s disdain for mathematics was widely shared by his fellow intellectuals. In that sense, Swift’s mockery of absentminded professors was standard issue. But, more than he could have known, Swift was right to direct his sharpest thrusts at mathematicians. These dreamers truly were, as Swift intuited, the most dangerous scientists of all. Microscopes and telescopes were the glamorous innovations that drew all eyes— Gulliver’s Travels testifies to Swift’s fascination with their power to reveal new worlds—but new instruments were only part of the story of the age. The insights that would soon