905 J Francesco Redi 1626-1697
Francisci Redi Nobilis Aretini, Experimenta circa varias res naturales, speciatim illas Quæ ex Indiis afferuntur. Ut & alia ejusdem Opuscula, que paginâ sequenti narrantur.
Amstelaedami : Apud Henricum Wetstenium, 1685. Price $2,500
The frontispiece signed by Cornelis Decker, allegorically depicts Redi’s confrontation with his opponent. Here Minerva, now seated at a richly bedecked experimental table with microscope, receives the natural wealth of the ‘Indies.’ Staring down upon a native carrying an armadillo and offering up a serpent’s stone, she reproves him for not testing the phenomenon experimentally.
Duodecimo; 13 x 7.5 cm. Signatures: π2 A-O¹² P⁴. signature L&M is on inferior paper, browned, and foxed as with most copies. Bound in modern paste boards. This work contains an added engraved title page, 2 full page engravings and 10 folding engravings.
This is the stand alone second volume of Redi’s Opusculorum. It includes Latin translation of Redi’s 1664 work on the poison of vipers plus response to criticism of that work by Alexandrum Morum and Abbatem Bourdelot.
Redi’s “investigations of several botanical and zoological specimens, including some brought from India; among them were Chinese star anise, ‘stones’ from cobras and iguanas, vanilla beans, and a leaf from the chinchona tree. The treatise is in the form of a letter to to Athanasius Kircher” (Norman). “Raro” (Prandi).
This volume occupies a pivotal place in the early scientific encounter with the New World. Redi’s Experimenta circa varias res naturales, speciatim illas quæ ex Indiis afferuntur is not merely a collection of physiological essays, but a sustained interrogation of exotic substances, animals, and marvels newly entering Europe through global trade. Drawing on specimens from the Americas, Africa, and Asia, vanilla beans, cinchona bark, serpent stones, armadillos, iguanas, and reported “fish women” from Brazil. Redi transforms objects of wonder into objects of experiment. The Indies here are not a theater of marvels but a testing ground, where inherited authorities and missionary reports are subjected to the discipline of observation, ligature, dissection, and repeatable trial.
Redi studied venomous snakes to dispel popular myths about them. He demonstrated that it is not true that vipers drink wine, that swallowing snake venom is toxic, or that venom is made in a snake’s gallbladder. He found that venom was not poisonous unless it entered the bloodstream and that the progression of venom in the patient could be slowed if a ligature was applied. His work paved the foundation for the science of toxicology.
This book is dedicated to Father Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). And here Redi criticized Kircher on the unreliability of Jesuit experimental science. Redi’s image of nature in the laboratory is part of a diptych [begun by the engraved title to “De Insectis” and] completed by the illustration..of his “Experiments on Diverse Natural Things, Particularly Those Which Come from the Indies,” (Experimenta circa varias res naturales, speciatim illas Quæ ex Indiis afferuntura) further response to the philosophical precepts imbedded in Kircher’s “Subterranean World.”
In this series of experiments, reported in the form of a letter to Kircher, Redi tackled the myth of the serpent’s stone, fabled to possess remarkable creative powers through its magnetic action on any venomous wound. Kircher supported this view and conducted numerous experiments with it at the Roman College to publicize its success; Redi politely responded that no living creature had ever been cured of anything by the application of the serpent’s stone.
As Redi constantly affirmed in his writings, ‘I do not put much faith in matters not made clear to me by experiment.’ Like the frontispiece Of Minerva Pointing uncompromisingly toward the books and microscope in front of her, the tools of natural philosophy, Minerva challenges ‘Received Wisdom’ to confront the Learned Past and the Experimental Present. She has become the symbol of the experimental dialectic that characterized natural history and natural philosophy in general by the mid-seventeenth century.”,
The Woman Fish
Image of a mermaid from Francesco Redi, Opusculorum pars prior; sive, Experimenta circa generationem insectorum (Amsterdam, 1686), 11, plate between D4 and D5.
The mermaid in Redi’s image of a ‘pece muger’ (fish woman) was said to exist off the coast of Brazil, but also quotes Fr Philip of the Blessed Trinity (1603-1671), a discalced Carmelite friar, who noted that these ‘sirens’ lived near the island of St Laurence in the western part of Africa and were called ‘fish women’ by the Portuguese.
Indonesian leach
The araticu fruit comes from the Annona Xylopiifolia tree and is also known as Araticu-Jaí. The name comes from the Tupi language and means “fruit of soft mass”.The adjective “Jaí” means “crooked or twisted or striated” and refers to the fruit’s shape.
Kircher and Redi exchanged correspondence expressing mutual admiration, as noted in Fletcher’s paper, Medical Men in the Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher (Janus LVI, 4. 1969).
Prandi, D. Redi 40. :Haller, Albrecht von. Bibliotheca Medicinæ Practicæ I; 531; Sabin 68516;
cf :Baldwin, M. (1995). The Snakestone Experiments: An Early Modern Medical Debate. Isis, 86(3), 394–418. http://www.jstor.org/stable/235020
https://www.jstor.org/stable/235020?read-now=1&seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents
Jamesgray2@me.com
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