Separation of the parts;

Head from Body: BEHEADING, strike of one’s head

Member from Member: QUARTERING, Dissecting.

Wound

At distance, whether

from hand: STONING, Pelting

from Instrument, as Gun, Bow, amp;c.: SHOOTING.

At hand, either by

Weight;

of something else: PRESSING.

of one’s own: PRECIPITATING, Defenestration, casting headlong.

Weapon;

any way: STABBING

direct upwards: EMPALING

Taking away necessary Diet: or giving that which is noxious

STARVING, famishing

POISONING, Venom, envenom, virulent

Interception of the air

at theMouth

in the air: stifling, smother, suffocate.

in the Earth: BURYING ALIVE

in water: DROWNING

in fire: BURNING ALIVE

at theThroat

by weight of a man’s own body: HANGING

by the strength of others: STRANGLING, throttle, choke, suffocate

MIXEDOF WOUNDING AND STARVING; THE BODY BEING

Erect : CRUCIFYING

Lying on a Wheel : BREAKING ON THE WHEEL

according to theGeneral name; signifying great pain: TORTURE according to special kinds:

byStriking;

with a limber instrument: WHIPPING, lashing, scourging, leashing, rod, slash, switch, stripe, Beadle

with a stiff instrument: CUDGELLING, bastinado, baste,

swinge, swaddle, shrubb, slapp, thwack;

byStretching of the limbs violently;

the body being laid along: RACK

the body lifted up into the Air: STRAPPADO

LIBERTY;OF WHICH ONE IS DEPRIVED, BY

into

a place: IMPRISONMENT, Incarceration, Durance, Custody, Ward,

clap up, commit, confine, mure, Pound, Pinfold, Gaol, Cage, Set fast

anInstrument: BONDS, fetters, gyves, shackles, manicles,

pinion, chains.

Out of a place or country, whether

with allowance of any other: EXILE, banishment

confinement to one other: RELEGATION

Repute, whether

more gently: INFAMIZATION, Ignominy, Pillory

more severely by burning marks in one’s flesh: STIGMATIZATION, Branding, Cauterizing

Estate; whether

in part: MULCT, fine, sconce

in whole: CONFISCATION, forfeiture

Dignity and power;by depriving one of

his degree: DEGRADING, deposing, depriving

his capacity to bear office: INCAPACITATING, cashier, disable,

discard, depose, disfranchize.

As Daniel scourged, bastinadoed, racked, and strappadoed his mind, trying to think of punishments that he and Wilkins had missed, he heard Hooke striking sparks with flint and steel, and went down to investigate.

Hooke was aiming the sparks at a blank sheet of paper. “Mark where they strike,” he said to Daniel. Daniel hovered with a pen, and whenever an especially large spark hit the paper, he drew a tight circle around it. They examined the paper under the Microscope, and found, in the center of each circle, a remnant: a more or less complete hollow sphere of what was obviously steel. “You see that the Alchemists’ conception of heat is ludicrous,” Hooke said. “There is no Element of Fire. Heat is really nothing more than a brisk agitation of the parts of a body-hit a piece of steel with a rock hard enough, and a bit of steel is torn away-”

“And that is the spark?”

“That is the spark.”

“But why does the spark emit light?”

“The force of the impact agitates its parts so vehemently that it becomes hot enough to melt.”

“Yes, but if your hypothesis is correct-if there is no Element of Fire, only a jostling of internal parts-then why should hot things emit light?”

“I believe that light consists of vibrations. If the parts move violently enough, they emit light-just as a struck bell vibrates to produce sound.”

Daniel supposed that was all there was to that, until he went with Hooke to collect samples of river insects one day, and they squatted in a place where a brook tumbled over the brink of a rock into a little pool. Bubbles of water, forced beneath the pool by the falling water, rose to the surface: millions of tiny spheres. Hooke noticed it, pondered for a few moments, and said: “Planets and stars are spheres, for the same reason that bubbles and sparks are.”

“What!?”

“A body of fluid, surrounded by some different fluid, forms into a sphere.Thus: air surrounded by water makes a sphere, which we call a bubble. A tiny bit of molten steel surrounded by air makes a sphere, which we call a spark. Molten earth surrounded by the C?lestial ?ther makes a sphere, which we call a planet.”

And on the way back, as they were watching a crescent moon chase the sun below the horizon, Hooke said, “If we could make sparks, or flashes of light, bright enough, we could see their light reflected off the shadowed part of that moon later, and reckon the speed of light.”

“If we did it with gunpowder,” Daniel reflected, “John Comstock would be happy to underwrite the experiment.”

Hooke turned and regarded him for a few moments with a cold eye, as if trying to establish whether Daniel, too, was made up out of cells. “You are thinking like a courtier,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice; he was stating, not an opinion, but a fact.

The chief Design of the aforementioned Club, was to propagate new Whims, advance mechanic Exercises, and to promote useless, as well as useful Experiments. In order to carry on this commendable Undertaking, any frantic Artist, chemical Operator, or whimsical Projector, that had but a Crotchet in their Heads, or but dream’d themselves into some strange fanciful Discovery, might be kindly admitted, as welcome Brethren, into this teeming Society, where each Member was respected, not according to his Quality, but the searches he had made into the Mysteries of Nature, and the Novelties, though Trifles, that were owing to his Invention: So that a Mad-man, who had beggar’d himself by his Bellows and his Furnaces, in a vain pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone; or the crazy Physician who had wasted his Patrimony, by endeavouring to recover that infallible Nostrum, Sal Graminis, from the dust and ashes of a burnt Hay-cock, were as much reverenc’d here, as those mechanic Quality, who, to shew themselves Vertuoso’s, would sit turning of Ivory above in their Garrets, whilst their Ladies below Stairs, by the help of their He-Cousins, were providing Horns for their Families.

-NEDWARD,The Vertuoso’s Club

THE LEAVES WERE TURNING,the Plague in London was worse. Eight thousand people died in a week. A few miles away in Epsom, Wilkins had finished the Ark digression and begun to draw up a grammar, and a system of writing, for his Philosophical Language. Daniel was finishing some odds and ends, viz. Nautical Objects: Seams and Spurkets, Parrels and Jears, Brales and Bunt-Lines. His mind wandered.