The sharp-eyed lynx, outfoxed by nature: Galileo and friends taught us that there is more to observing than meets the eye

Natural History, May, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

unexpected an event; it is too recent, too

unparalleled, and I am restrained by my

own inadequacy and the fear of error

After this lengthy preamble on the maximally celebrated Galileo, I now wish to present the main subject of this dual essay: the virtually unknown Francesco Stelluti, one of the original four Lynxes, a loyal friend and supporter of Galileo, and the man who tried to maintain--and eventually disbanded with dignity in 1652--the original Academy of the Lynxes, fatally weakened after Cesi's untimely death in 1630. The previously uncharted links between Stelluti and Galileo are rich and fascinating (I would have said "the links between these Lynxes," if the pun were not so horrific) and provide a poignant illustration of this essay's central theme: the power and poverty of pure empiricism and the need to scrutinize the social and intellectual contexts of research, both for practicing scientists (so they will not be beguiled) and for all people who wish to understand the role and history of knowledge (so they will grasp the necessary and complex interdigitation of science and society).

The original Lynxes began with all the bravado and secrecy of a typical boys' club (Cesi, remember, was only eighteen years old, while his three compatriots were all twenty-six). They wrote complex rules and enunciated lofty ideals. (I do not know whether or not they developed a secret handshake.) Each adopted a special role, received a Latin moniker, and took a planet for his emblem. The leader, Cesi, commanded the botanical sciences as Coelivagus (the heavenly wanderer); the Dutchman Johannes van Heeck would read and interpret classical philosophy as Illuminatus; Anastasio de Filiis became the group's historian and secretary as Eclipsatus. Poor Francesco Stelluti, who published little and evidently saw himself as a systematic plodder, took up mathematics and geometry under the name of Tardigradus (the slow stepper). For his planet, Stelluti received the most distant and most slowly revolving body--Saturn, the subject of Galileo's error.

In their maturity, the Lynxes would provide powerful intellectual and institutional support for the open and empirical approach to science, as promoted by their most prominent member Galileo. But at their beginnings, as a small club of young men, the Lynxes preferred the older tradition of science as an arcane and secret form of knowledge, vouchsafed only to initiates who learned the codes and formulas that could reveal the mysterious harmonies of universal order--the astrological links between planetary positions and human lives; the alchemical potions and philosophers' stones, heated in vats, that could transmute base metals to gold ("Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble," to cite some famous witches); and the experiments in smoke, mirrors, and optical illusions that occupied an uncertain position between categories now labeled as magic and science, but then conflated. Giambattista della Porta, the fifth Lynx, had survived as a living legend of this fading philosophy. Della Porta had made his reputation in 1558, long before the birth of any original Lynx, with a book entitled Magia naturalis (Natural magic). As a young man in Naples, della Porta had founded his own arcane organization, the Accademia dei Segreti (the Academy of Secrets), dedicated to alchemical and astrological knowledge and later officially suppressed by the Inquisition. By initiating the aged della Porta into the Academy of the Lynxes, Cesi and his compatriots showed the strength of their earlier intellectual allegiances. By inducting Galileo the next year, they displayed their ambivalence and their growing attraction to a new view of knowledge and scientific procedure.