I have started reading the six volumes of The Scientific Correspondence of Joseph Banks, Neil Chambers, ed. I thought I’d share my favorite letter so far, and the rabbit hole it has led me down. The rabbit holes are the point – Banks’s network will lead to interesting science.
From Thomas Falconer, Chester, 17 May 1773 to Joseph Banks, discussing interesting questions for a northern voyage (which Banks never made).
One indeed occurs of some little consequence viz the different specific gravities of salt water This question includes much. The general idea now is that the Sea /water/ at the Poles contains much less salt, or in other words is specifically lighter than that at the equator. I know the experiment is rather difficult to ascertain & may be more so at the pole where the action of gravity may possibly be different.
However it may be & should be tried first in these seas. Gaubius has a treatise on this subject to be found in a small 4to [title removed] The result of his experiments were that the wt of the salt water opposite Leyden was to rain water May Fahrenheits thermom 55 as 1026 to 1000; & in October Thermr 56 1021=1000, This difference is pretty considerable on the same spot & whether it can be ascertained more exactly I am not philosopher enough to determine.
Thomas Falconer, the writer of this letter, was an educated gentleman in Chester who was called to the bar but was too sickly to work. He’s not particularly described as a natural philosopher[1], but given this letter, we can credit him with a lively interest in the world in general.
Gaubius – Hieronymus David Gaubius – was a German physician and chemist. He trained in Germany and France and worked in the Netherlands[2]. Which is very European of him. He wrote in Latin, as scientists did in those days. I found his works on the Internet Archive including the 4to in question[3] (although when you click on “learn more” it takes you to the Wiki entry.)
4to means quarto – a book about 8x10. The book, titled Adversariorum varii argumenti Liber unus Cap 1mum de aqua maris septentrionalis orae Begicae, published in 1771, is in Latin naturally, it was the language of science in the day. Joseph Banks didn’t read Latin (or Greek) having been an indifferent student. Falconer apparently did. I don’t, but there is Google translate and Optical Character Recognition. However, 21st century OCR and 18th century scientific Latin don’t work well together. It’s the elongated s that trips up the OCR – s looks like f, unless ss looks like ft.
For example:
is menfe when OCR is used. It is before the word Octobre and pretty clearly is mense, month. Context helped that time, but normally I don’t understand enough to lean on context. I look hard to see if there is a tiny mark on the left, but not on the right, side about midway up. It’s a slow process, correcting the text paragraph by paragraph, carefully distinguishing between elongated s and f; the English that comes out of it is understandable if not flowing.
One thing that did break our way – the Latin of the 17th and 18th centuries was pretty close to classical Latin. The Renaissance humanists recovered Latin, as much as they could, from the variations floating around and took classical texts (Virgil, Pliny etc) as models. I wonder what Google translate would make of the Latin in which Carmina Burana, as an example, was written, or even Bede’s Ecclesiastical History?
We have an on-line copy of a book about sea water, written in “recovered” Latin by a German scientist living in the Netherlands, read, and then discussed (in English) by a clergyman in Chester in a letter sent to Joseph Banks in London.
On to the letter itself.
Fahrenheit, like Gaubius, was German but worked and in the end died, in Amsterdam[4]. He’d been gone several decades when this letter was written, but the scientific community had adopted his temperature scale. The usage isn’t the relatively snappy “degrees Fahrenheit” or “°F” that would become standard, but it’s there, and understandable to us.
“Specifically lighter” in our modern phrase would be “lower specific gravity” or more often, more colloquially, less dense. (Now there is a clear distinction between density and specific gravity, but I’m not sure it was all that clear in 1773.) Oil is “specifically lighter” than water. Sea water, salt water, is more dense than rain water – and I agree the differences cited by Gaubius are significant – we would say the specific gravity of one was 1.021 and the other 1.026. I’ve worked places where that would be enough to put a product out of spec. Gaubius carefully controlled for temperature (hot water is less dense than cold) but I wonder if it had just rained in October, and the sea water was diluted by run-off. It seems like Gaubius was a careful enough scientist to account for that, but he doesn’t mention it in the first 20 paragraphs of that article I’ve managed to read so far.
Falconer wonders if the action of gravity different at the poles? It’s a sensible question, and I had to go looking to find the answer. It is lower at the poles in fact. These guys, these 18th century learned gentlemen (and the occasional learned lady) knew some things. There were things they didn’t know, but this letter shows them thinking about what they don’t know, and how to go about figuring it out. This is the combination that draws me to the era – there’s no Kahn Academy or Wiki, or even the textbooks and references that got us scientists through the 20th century. They have to go figure it all out – but they are asking sensible questions, and discussing the science with each other. The letters let us listen in.
[1] Rigg, J., & Marchand, J. (2008, January 03). Falconer, Thomas (1736/7–1792), classical scholar. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 7 Aug. 2024, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-9114.
[2] Hieronymus David Gaubius - Wikipedia
[3] Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine