JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This short notice by Cassini1 published in 1730 has a lot going for it--I just like the design, and the way it sits on the page, unrushed by another article beginning right underneath it, plenty of space, wide margins, and so on. Also the content is pretty interesting--the great astronomer went out and collected some new fallen snow and had a peep of it under a microscope (the instrument 100 years old or so at this point), and briefly reports his lovely findings. The editors state that there are "so many branches furnished with leaves that a few flakes form like a specie of flower. Cassini--a very busy man--states that he didn't have the journal space nor his own time to write something about what he saw in the snowflakes, so simply presented the editor with an engraving of what he witnessed. The image of the snowflakes will "suddenly make one understand what a long speech might not be able to explain". ("Il ne fe trouve pas ici allez de place pour en faire la defeription : mais les deux figures que l’on en donne feront comprendre tout d’un coup ce qu’un long discours ne pourroit peut-être pas fi bien expliquer.") I think you could say it is still fairly early to see these snowflake images, though I'm not sure yet when the first published micrographic images of snowflakes appeared. (Robert Hooke published micro images in his Micrographia in 1665, though I don't know if his were the first. Earlier still were Kepler and his famous Charles Bridge observations of the six-cornered snowflake, though the images weren't made via a microscope though they were the first scientific endeavors with the snowflake...)
Notes:
1. Giovanni Cassini, 1625-1712. The note appears in Memoires de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, Depuis 1666 jusqua 1699, Paris, 1730, and was first published in 1692.
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