Notes

1 both translated in the Black Coat Press collection Amilec and Other Satirical Fantasies, ISBN 978-1-61227-033-3.

2 The city that the ancient Greeks called Chrysopolis has nowadays been absorbed by the urban sprawl of Istanbul, the successor to Byzantium and Constantinople, but retains the independent name of Üsküdar. The Greek name means “city of gold;” opinions vary as to whether it was so named because there was once a gold depository there or because of the way it shone when viewed from Byzantium at sunset. It was the scene of more than one significant battle in the long-running conflict between the Greeks and the Persians; in 1775 Üsküdar was one of three communities outside the city walls of Constantinople—a city that La Follie’s novel calls Bisance (a variant of Byzantium) in pursuit of the same calculated archaism.

3 This eccentric list of names mingles Classical writers with Renaissance writers, the latter including some who became notorious after their deaths, perhaps unjustly, for their interest in occult sciences; it is not obvious why they would be aggregated in the Arts section of Nadir’s library, even though La Follie’s “Arts” means something closer to our “technology” than “fine arts.” The books in question presumably include Giambattista della Porta’s Magiae Naturalis [Natural Magic] (1558); Antoine Mizaud’s Harmonia coelestium corporum et humanorum [Celestial, Corporeal and Human Harmony] (1555); all 38 volumes of the collected works of Albertus Magnus; and Girolamo Cardano’s De Subtitlitate [On Subtility—i.e., Transcendental Philosophy] (1552). No books by the Classical author Paxamus survive, the name only being known via secondary references, but he was credited, perhaps apocryphally, with a guide to erotic positions known as the Dodecatechnon. “Africanus” is presumably the Moorish diplomat Joannes Leo Africanus, whose geographical history of Africa, pubished in 1526, includes a probably-apocryphal account of the Alchemical Society of Fez. “Alexis” is presumably the Greek comic poet, none of whose works survive in complete form. The same fate befell almost all the 74 works of the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro. Plato’s friend Archytas, also known as Tarentinus, was reputed to be the founder of mathematical mechanics. The Swiss physician and naturalist Albrecht von Haller, or Albertus Hallerius, who was still alive in 1775, is an odd and slightly mischievous inclusion, presumably occasioned by his extensive contributions to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, of which La Follie did not entirely approve. “Silvius” is presumably Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405-1464), or Pope Pius II, a prolific writer sometimes known as “the humanist pope.”

4 La Follie’s contemporary readers would immediately have recognized a subtle transfiguration of le Vieillard de Ferney [the Old Man of Ferney], Ferney having been the location of Voltaire’s residence since 1758, where he eventually died in 1778.

5 Pannonia was an ancient province of the Roman Empire, covering an area now distributed between Hungary, Austria and various Balkan States. The reference might have in mind Ayse Sine, the Bulgarian-born first wife of the Ottoman Sultan who had come to the throne in 1774, Abdul Hamid I; she was still a teenager in 1775.

6 An old name for Paris.

7 La Follie’s rendering of “Pashas.”

8 This word does not appear to exist anywhere but in this single reference, so its meaning has to be deduced from context.

9 The notion of the glass spheres was presumably derived from La Follie’s acquaintance with the Leyden Jar, a device for storing static electricity invented in the 1740s. Such jars were often connected up to increase the stored charge, into what Benjamin Franklin, who conducted an extensive study of electrical phenomena in the 1750s, called a “battery.”

10 Specific weight is the weight per volume of a material; unlike density, it is not absolute.

11 Limestone, in our understanding, does not “calcinate”—by which La Follie means “form a calx,” not “take on calcium”—because it is already oxidated, but because it undergoes manifest changes when heated, many phlogiston theories assumed that those chances must be of the same kind as those that other objects undergo when heated or burnt.

12 i.e., clay.

13 The thesis that the sun’s energy was continually replenished by comets falling into it was popularized in France by the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, whose publication commenced in 1745. He is presumably the scientist to whom the Philosopher is referring.

14 Acidum pingue, like ‘Grasacido’ means “fatty acid,” but not in the sense that that term is nowadays used in organic chemistry; it was derived from Becher’s terra pinguis by Johann Mayer in a textbook of Chemistry published in 1764, as a theoretical substitute for phlogiston supposedly compounded fire, light and an unknown acid substance. As Grasacido will shortly admit, the term was sometimes used to designate sulphur, but he wants to use it more ambitiously, in a fashion that he will try in vain to explain.

15 Latus is Latin for “flank” or “side,” usually used in the context of exposure; with respect to sulphur it could be used with reference to the substance’s crystalline structure, or to its different isomeric forms, but again, Grasacido has higher ambitions for it.

16 Although its use at this point in the narrative commentary is a joke, the subsequent discussion of “fixed air” reflects the disputes and confusions arising from Rutherford’s isolation of de-oxygenated air, although the term had earlier been popularized in the 1750s by Joseph Black with respect to the gas produced from limestone by heating or treatment with acid. Fixoventi’s name is, of course, a pun parallel to ‘Grasacido.’

17 A ligne was a measurement in use in France at the time, corresponding to a twelfth of a pouce, which was the French inch, here translated as “inch;” three lignes is therefore about a quarter of an inch.

18 The reasoning in question originated with Isaac Newton, but the Physicist is presumably referring to Voltaire’s citation of it in his 1734 essay on Newton, which popularized Newton’s ideas in France.

19 Skepticism remained a fundamental position of many French philosophers and scientists following René Descartes’ famous meditation on the topic, published in 1637.

20 Newton.

21 The reference is presumably to naturally carbonated water, often produced in volcanic springs, but it is not obvious which particular “bad mountain” Nadir means. Artificially carbonated water had only recently become available in 1775, having been invented by Joseph Priestley in 1767; La Follie had obviously read Priestley’s 1772 paper “Impregnating Water with Fixed Air,” which describes a method using his beloved oil of vitriol to liberate the gas from limestone.

22 A device popularized by Heron of Alexandria but previously described by Vitruvius in the first century B.C., in which steam is used to generate motion.

23 The reference is to one of Daniel Rutherford’s experiments; La Follie, the Doctor and the Philosopher do not, of course, realize that two different gases—carbon dioxide and oxygen—are in play in the contrasted experiments, thus seeing a contradiction where none really exists.

24 A mark, in this sense, was about eight ounces.

25 A Sangiac, or Sanjak, was one of the administrative subdivisions recognized in the bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire, and hence, by extension the official in charge of the region in question.

26 The ancient instrument in question, in which the length of one or more strings is varied by movable bridges, is sometimes held to have been originated by Pythagoras; it was more widely used in scientific demonstrations than making music.

27 It is impossible to identify this piece from the lines quoted by La Follie, which score no hits on Google.

28 This is a slightly garbled version of a thesis set out by Benoît de Maillet in Telliamed. It was echoed in several later works of French roman scientifique, including a striking episode in Hippolyte Mettais’ L’An 5865 (1865; available in a Black Coat Press edition as The Year 5865, ISBN 9781612271002).

29 Newton, in Opticks (1717).

30 This is a curious reference, as the famous alchemist known in the West by the name of Geber probably lived in the 8th century; his link with Fez was suggested by Leo Africanus, who made him the leader of its Alchemical Society in the book published in 1526 that probably featured among those that Nadir threw out of his library.

31 Presumably the clove, once classified as Caryophyllus aromaticus, but nowadays identified as Eugenia caryophyllata.

32 This reference is not to diethyl ether, which was later used as an anesthetic and (a trifle paradoxically) as a stimulant, or to any other compound that would now be described as an ether in the terminology of organic chemistry. It is probably sal ammoniac (“smelling salts”), which was a standard treatment for fainting, although they would be inhaled rather than drunk, and it is odd that Zirmen does not use the term, as he has referred to the compound by that name before.