Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
disease carriers on the food that he had left to rot in his kitchen;
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's higher-quality instruments were not read-
ily available at that time. He attempted to decipher Egyptian hiero-
glyphics but did not have the benefit of the Rosetta Stone, which still
lay hidden in the waters near Alexandria. Kircher developed a magic
lantern for projecting images on to walls (it is purely coincidental that
some three hundred years later a Catholic priest in western Ireland
used a similar device to project images of Our Lady on the gable end of
his church. These 'apparitions' led to the site becoming a place of
pilgrimage and an international airport can be found close by in the
middle of a peat bog). He was also interested in water-powered church
organs, and attempted to measure temperature by examining the
buoyancy of small heated balls. Towards the end of his life he wished
to become a missionary in China but was refused permission to
embark on this calling, and he died on 28 November 1680 in Rome
where his museum can still be seen in the Roman College. His heart
was buried in a church he had built on the Sabine Hill, which today is a
major place of pilgrimage.
Kircher's ideas on the Earth were first developed when he tra-
velled through the volcanic regions around Naples and Sicily in 1637
and the following year, which coincided with a major earthquake that
destroyed the town of Euphemia. Kircher was keen to see the effects of
this event for himself and so travelled to Naples where he was lowered
into the crater of Vesuvius from a rope. Using the pantometer, an
instrument that he had invented himself for measuring angles, slopes
and heights, he measured the dimensions of the crater. His ideas on
the internal structure and dynamic nature of the Earth were developed
over a long period, and only published nearly twenty-five years later in
his Mundus subterraneus in 1665. His theories were, unsurprisingly
for a Jesuit priest, in harmony with the biblical teachings, and he failed
to speculate on the age of the Earth. However, his ideas were impor-
tant as they were among the first to describe what happened within
the Earth. Understanding these internal workings was an essential
prerequisite to the understanding of how various natural phenomena
