"Quicksilver"

[fiefoe]

Except for a gruesome experiment of making a head speak, (still not gruesome enough to inoculate me against "Sin City", unfortunately,) the science being done by the Royal Society and its continental brethrens is pretty exciting, especially when they are poetically wrong.

• Mr. HOOKE displayed an invention for testing whether a surface is level, consisting of a bubble of air trapped in a sealed glass tube, otherwise filled with water.
• Mr. BOYLE reported that swallows live under frozen water in the Baltic.
• Various items of what he could only assume were ladies' undergarments (they were definitely garments, but he had never seen their like-Q.E.D.)
• It was actually the buzzing of a whole civilization of flies, so large that many of them seemed to be singing bass.
• a Brazilian compass-fish
• "I understand the similitude now, Doctor. The Bibliothèque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world." "And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer."
• ...each (watch) was equipped, not just with two but three hands, the third moving so quickly that you could see its progress round the dial-counting the seconds! Many hunched glances, now, toward Robert Hooke, the Hephaestus of the tiny.
  

ref: caduceus, Comenius of Moravia, strappado, cashier (v.)
demilune: A work constructed beyond the main ditch of a fortress, and in front of the curtain between two bastions, intended to defend the curtain; a ravelin.

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