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Tomorrow you try again. Salt water is like a medicine, do not think it was gross harm, Caspar
consoled him on deck. And as Roberto made peace with the sea, fishing, Caspar ex-plained to him how
many and what advantages they would both derive from his arrival on the Island. It was not even worth
mentioning the recovery of the boat, with which they would be able to move as free men from ship to
shore; they would further have access to the Specula Melitensis.
From Roberto s report, we must infer that this apparatus exceeded his powers of comprehension or
that Father Cas-par s account of it, like so many other speeches of his, was made up of ellipses and
interjections, as the father spoke now of its form, now of its function, and now of the Idea that governed
it.
And the Idea was not even his. He had learned of the Specula leafing through the papers of a deceased
brother, who in his turn had learned of it from another brother who during a voyage to the most noble
island of Malta, or Melita, had heard praise of this instrument constructed by order of the Most Eminent
Prince Johannes Paulus Lascaris, Grand Master of the famous Knights.
What the Specula was like, no one had ever seen: the first brother left only a booklet of sketches and
notes, which for that matter had now disappeared. And, on the other hand, Caspar complained, that
same opuscule was brevissimamente scripto, con nullo schemate visualiter patefacto, nulle tabule nee
rotule, und nulla specialis instructione.
On the basis of that meager information Father Caspar, in the course of the long voyage on theDaphne,
setting the ship s carpenters to work, had redesigned or else misconstructed the various elements of the
technasma, mounting them then on the Island and measuring,in situ, its countless virtues and the
Specula must truly have been an Ars Magna in flesh and blood, or, rather, in wood, iron, canvas, and
other substances, a kind of Megahorologium, an Animated Book capable of revealing all the mysteries of
the Universe.
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It was Father Caspar said, his eyes glowing like car-buncles a Unique Syntagma of Novissimi
Instrumenti Physici et Mathematici, in rotas and cycles artfully disposed. Then he drew on the deck or
in the air with his finger, and bade Roberto to think of a circular first element, a kind of base or
foundation which showed the Immobile Horizon, with the Rhomb of the Thirty-two Winds and all the Ars
Navigatoria with forecasts of every storm. For the Median Section, he then added, built on this
foundation, imagine a Cube with five sides can you imagine? nein, not six, the sixth rests on the
foundation so you do not see him. In the first side of the Cube (id est the Chronoscopium Universalis)
you can see eight wheels arranged in perennial cycles represent the Calendars of Julius and of Gregory,
and when recur the Sundays and the Epacts, and the Solar Circle, and the Moveable and Paschal Feasts,
and novilunes and plenilunes, quadratures of the sun and moon. In the secundum Cubilatere, id est das
Cosmigra-phicum Speculum, in primo loco occurs a Horoscopium with which given the hour of Melita
present, what hour it is in the rest of our globe can be found. And you see a Wheel with two
planispheres: one displays and teaches all the scientia of the Primum Mobile, and the second the doctrine
of the Octava Sphaera and the fixed stars, and motion. And the fluxo et refluxo, quid est decrease and
increase of the seas, from the movement of the moon stirred in all the Universe....
This second was the most thrilling side. Thanks to it the observer could know that Horologium
Catholicum mentioned before, with the hour at the Jesuit missions on every meridian; and further, it could
also perform the functions of a good astrolabe, in that it revealed as well the quantity of the days and the
nights, the height of the sun, the Umbrae Rectae et Versae, the altitude of the stars above the horizon, the
quantity of crepuscules, the culmination of the fixed stars by year, month, and day. And it was through
repeated experimentation here that Father Caspar had arrived at the certitude finally of being on the
antipodal meridian.
There was then a third side that contained in seven united wheels all Astrology, all the future eclipses of
the sun and moon, all the Zodiacal figures for the times of agriculture, medicine, and the art of navigation,
along with the twelve signs of the Celestial Houses, and the physiognomy of the natural things that depend
from each sign, and the corre-sponding House.
I lack the courage to summarize all of Roberto s summary, so I will only mention the fourth side, which
supposedly ex-pounded all the wonders of botanical medicine, spagyrical, chemical, and hermetical, with
simple and compound medi-cines derived from mineral or animal substances, and the Alexipharmaca,
attractive, lenitive, purgative, mollificative, di-gestive, corrosive, conglutinative, aperitive, calefactive,
infrigi-dative, mundificative, attenuative, incisive, soporative, diuretic, narcotic, caustic, and comfortative.
I cannot explain what was on the fifth side, that is, the roof of the cube parallel to the line of the horizon,
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