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I think it's humbling to see how much he understands that people of his time lack knowledge in so many areas. Like the source of electricity in certain bugs. I
by zelon88 7y ago
I think it's humbling to see how much he understands that people of his time lack knowledge in so many areas. Like the source of electricity in certain bugs. I feel like modern authors would just do this little bit of research to find an answer they could cite, but back then the availability of that information just wasn't there. If you didn't personally already possess some knowledge, you were hard pressed to find that knowledge.
I also got a chuckle that the text becomes condensed near the end of the article. What could be the reason for that?
- frosted-flakes 7y agoI imagine it could be quite difficult to estimate ahead of time how much of the page would be filled by the text. I can picture the typesetter cursing when he realises he's going to run out of room and switching to a smaller font, rather than re-setting the whole page.
- zelon88 7y agoI figured it was something like that. It's also kind of ironic that the more people become involved in the refinement of documents like this the less and less obvious their contributions become. For example, old official hand-written documents were delegated to scribes. Then authors in this era sent their work out to type-setters who used hand crafted tools created by another layer of artisans. Then to printing presses full of machines which were designed by artisans, built by artisans, and operated by artisans. Now in modern times the layers are as deep as the technology sector, with thousands of people having contributed to digital publishing equipment and thousands of programmers writing and re-writing better and better software to create a better and better product. It's interesting seeing generations of compounded human knowledge side by side with earlier generations.