Notes — (1 of 2)

1. Only in the wake of photography in the 1850s did thorough pictorial realism emerge with Gustave Courbet and his followers (Marnin Young, Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015]). For Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison, the notion of an objective world surfaced similarly with photography (Objectivity [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007]).

2. See Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

3. See, for instance, Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Ann Marie Plane, Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

4. See Steve Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

5. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

6. Italian poet Alessandro Allegri illustrates this nonpresentism in a 1607 text (just prior to the telescope) by comparing “glasses” and “texts”—that is, prosthetic vision and envisioning. Allegri argues that “if the former let you look at many things, with the latter you may learn an infinite number; if the former reveal distant things, the latter show you bygone ones. . . . With glasses we see no more than present things, but with texts, we can even learn the future.” Alessandro Allegri, Seconda parte delle rime piacevoli (Verona: Bartolamio Merlo dalle Donne, 1607), fol. B2v–B3, cited in Eileen Reeves, Evening News: Optics, Astronomy, and Journalism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 18.

7. For this hegemonic imperative, see, for instance, Daniel J. Cook, “Leibniz on ‘Advancing Toward a Greater Culture,’” Studia Leibnitiana 50, no. 2 (2018): 163–79.

8. See David Cahan, ed., From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth Century Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

9. Mechanical objectivity is the signature pictorial priority of post-photography nineteenth-century science according to Daston and Galison (Objectivity).

10. David Philip Miller, “The Story of ‘Scientist: The Story of a Word,’” Annals of Science 74, no. 4 (2017): 255–61.

11. For crossovers between science, imaging, and metaphysics, see Robert M. Brain, Robert S. Cohen, and Ole Knudsen, eds., Hans Christian Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007); John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

12. Visualizing encompasses what Svetlana Alpers calls “picturing,” which itself exceeds visual art representations per se via cultural discourse, experimentation, and theorization (The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983]). For visualization as an overlooked practice in visual culture, see Klaus Hentschel, Visual Cultures in Science and Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Nancy Anderson, “Eye and Image: Looking at a Visual Studies of Science,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 39, no. 1 (2009): 115–25; Scott Curtis and Robert Lue, “Bridging Science, Art, and the History of Visualization,” Discourse 37, no. 3 (2015): 193–206.

13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, vol. 1 (London: Rest Fenner, 1817). Coleridge condemns the wordy flourishes of a translation by Pope that loses sight of “the whole visual likeness” of Homer’s imagination. He favors another translation that deploys an “allegory of visualized Puns” (48).

14. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), “visualization,” https://www.oed.com/oedv2/00278329. Relatedly, to envisage was imported from French into English in 1820 by Coleridge’s friend John Keats, and John Herschel used it in an astronomical sense by 1836 (Oxford English Dictionary, “envisage,” last updated September 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1053207940). To envision was coined in 1921 as the word television came of use (Oxford English Dictionary, “envision,” last updated July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1025927510).

15. Saint Augustine’s dichotomy remained central in premodern optics: “There are two visions, one of perception (sentiensis), the other of thought (cogitantis).” A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 153.

16. For Enlightenment thinkers’ instrumental belief that Blackness is abnormal and in need of a pathological explanation, see Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

17. See M. Norton Wise, “Making Visible,” Isis 97, no. 1 (2006): 75–82.

18. Antje Pfannkuchen argues the same point in “When Nature Begins to Write Herself: German Romanticism Reads the Electroscope” (PhD diss., New York University, 2010).

19. Carl Hanser, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Schriften und Briefe (Munich, Germany: Hanser Verlag, 1971), A2:220, 25; D:687, 107. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

20. [Wilhelm] Homberg, “Réflexions sur différentes végétations métalliques,” Mémoires de mathématique et de physique tirés des registres de l’Académie royale des sciences (November 30, 1692): 145–52. Homberg also researched interactions of light with matter, including silver nitrate. Lawrence Principle, The Transmutations of Chymistry: Wilhelm Homberg and the Académie royale des sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 128.

21. Manuel Bonnet and Jean-Louis Marignier, Niépce: Correspondance et papiers (Saint-Loup de Varenne, France: Maison Nicéphore Niépce, 2003), 708, 712.

22. Albertus Magnus noted silver salts’ darkening effect in the thirteenth century. Medical treatises well into the nineteenth century routinely mention such treatments. Ferenc Szabadváry, History of Analytical Chemistry (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1966), 17.

23. Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colors (London: Herringman, 1664), 151–53.

24. Everard Home, “On the Rete Mucosum,” in Supplement to the Foregoing Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, vol. 5 (London: Longman et al., 1828), 284.

25. Everard Home, “On the Black Rete Mucosum of the Negro, Being a Defence Against the Scorching Effects of the Sun’s Rays,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 111 (1821): 1–6. Since the eclipse was over England, the two Black men were likely free, since enslaved peoples on British soil could sue for emancipation after Somerset v. Stewart (1772) and Knight v. Wedderburn (1778).

26. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 7.

27. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 159. Peirce conducted stellar photometric research at the Harvard Observatory.

28. Commercial photographic film stocks were calibrated for white skin via Shirley cards, photos of white women’s faces. Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communications 34, no. 1 (2009): 111–36; Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching the Camera to See My Skin: Navigating Photography’s Inherited Bias Against Dark Skin,” BuzzFeed News, April 2, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-to-see-my-skin.

29. For artificial colorization of deep space images producing a false cosmic look, see Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

30. Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

31. Descartes’s “vortices” as rotating envelopes of ether currents were not kinemorphic.

32. Klaas van Berkel, Isaac Beckman on Matter and Motion: Mechanical Philosophy in the Making (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 105. For Ofer Gal, “motion” is “the great intellectual challenge of the early modern era” (Ofer Gal, “Two Bohemian Journeys: Real, Imaginary and Idealized Voyages at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century,” in Motion and Knowledge in the Changing Early Modern World, ed. Ofer Gal and Yi Zheng [Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2014]).

33. George Berkeley, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin: Aaron Rhames, 1709), 163. See Nicholas J. Wade, A Natural History of Vision (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 201–34. For Nicholas J. Wade, “a sequence of discrete images could not be observed in the natural environment” (202).

34. The mistaken idea that “retinal persistence” explains our perception of moving images as an illusion derived from quickly superimposed static images recurs in film historiography into the twentieth century. Max Wertheimer demonstrated in the 1910s that visual perception of motion involves not static or synthetic representations but a neural kinesthetic unity instead. Cinema studies keep having to wrestle with this illusionistic persistence. See Rafe McGregor, “Cinematic Realism: A Defence from Plato to Gaut,” British Journal of Aesthetics 58, no. 3 (2018): 225–39.

35. Long thought to be an original made by Janssen from Nagasaki, Japan, during the actual transit, this plate was recently shown to be only a test plate. Actual plates would look much the same. Françoise Launay and Peter D. Hingley, “Jules Janssen’s ‘Revolver Photographique’ and Its British Derivative, ‘the Janssen Plate,’” Journal for the History of Astronomy 31 (2005): 70–71.

36. Animated visualizations unfold in continuous visual streams, such as sequential images or temporal scenarios like visualizing the apsidal precession of the Moon’s orbit around Earth in the 1740s (see Siegfried Bodenmann, “The 18th-Century Battle over Lunar Motion,” Physics Today 63, no. 1 [2010]: 27–32). Nick Hopwood pinpoints the origin of sequential pictorial strategies “around 1800,” stating it equally involves images and texts—thus polyvalent visualization (Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015], 12).

37. For clouds as philosophical prototypes and metaphors of media environments, see John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

38. Luke Howard, “On the Modifications of Clouds, and the Principles of Their Production, Suspension, and Destruction,” Philosophical Magazine 16 (1802–1803): 97.

39. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Annuaire météorologique pour l’An X (Paris: Maillard, 1802), 115.

40. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s coinage of the noun Morphologie in 1796 was inspired by dynamic physiologist Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, who attempted to combine a body’s “ability to turn the impression made on the nerves into images” with its growth and reproduction to explain the “simultaneous and successive metamorphosis” of plants and insects all the way to higher intelligence (Gabrielle Bersier, “Visualizing Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s Organic Forces,” Monatshefte 97, no. 1 [2005]: 20). Goethe found similar insights in Zoonomia (1794–1796) by Erasmus Darwin—the grandfather of Charles Darwin and the uncle and tutor of Thomas Wedgwood (32).

41. Lamarck hypothesized that Earth was hundreds of millions of years old, while his Catholic nemesis, Georges Cuvier, insisted on a divine origin of six millennia. See Richard Burckhardt Jr., “Lamarck, Evolution, and the Inheritance of Acquired Characters,” Genetics 194 (August 2013): 793–805; Snait Gissis, “Interactions Between Social and Biological Thinking: The Case of Lamarck,” Perspectives on Science 17, no. 3 (2009): 237–306; Koen B. Tanghe, “Leave Lamarck Alone! Why the Use of the Term ‘Lamarckism’ and Its Cognates Must Be Shunned,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 62, no. 1 (2019): 72–94.

42. Howard debunked an apocryphal lunar theory of weather attributed to William Herschel (John R. Starr, “Herschel’s Weather Table,” Weather 57 [2002]: 99–100). Herschel and Howard published articles on the Sun in the same issue of the Philosophical Magazine (June 1800) and researched weather cycles. Similarities between morphic cosmologies of Herschel and Lamarck are mentioned in “Cosmogony,” Chamber’s Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: R. Chambers, 1871), 262.

43. See Michael Hoskin, “Nebulae, Star Clusters and the Milky Way from Galileo to William Herschel,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 34 (2008): 369.

44. See Teun Koetsier, A History of Kinematics from Zeno to Einstein: On the Role of Motion in the Development of Mathematics (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2023).

45. G. F. Rodwell, “On the Perception of the Unseen,” in Report of the Marlborough College Natural History Society, vol. 17 (Marlborough, England: Perkins, 1873), 30.

46. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter, England: Exeter University Press, 2000); Laurent Mannoni, Donato Pesenti Campagnoni, and David Robinson, Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture, 1420–1896 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

47. For the telescope as a tool of visualization, see Antoni Malet, “Early Conceptualizations of the Telescope as an Optical Instrument,” Early Science and Medicine 10, no. 2 (2005): 237–62. For temporal chemical images as part of the prehistory of photography, see Matthew C. Hunter, Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

48. Victor Fouque, La Vérité sur l’invention de la photographie (Paris: Librairie des auteurs, 1867).

49. Eliza Meteyard, A Group of Englishmen (1795–1815) (London: Longmans, Green, 1871); R. B. Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood: The First Photographer (London: Duckworth, 1903).

50. Josef Maria Eder, History of Photography, trans. Edward Epstean (1932; New York: Columbia University Press, 1945).

51. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949); Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955); André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (1958; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); George Sadoul, L’Invention du cinéma (Paris: Denoël, 1946).

52. Deac Rossell, “Quartet: Four Stories of Early Cinema Research,” Early Popular Visual Culture 14, no. 4 (2016): 404. See also Deac Rossell, Chronology of the Birth of Cinema 1833–1896 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022).

53. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiler (London: Verso, 1989); Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); François Albera and Maria Tortajada, Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).

54. See Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, eds., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990); Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, and the Invention of Photography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Bonnet and Marignier, Niépce; Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” in The Cinema: A New Technology for the 20th Century, ed. André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Veronneau (Lausanne, Switzerland: Editions Payot, 2004); Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow; André Gaudreault, Cinéma et attraction: Pour une nouvelle histoire du cinématographe (Paris: CNRS, 2008); Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media; Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

55. Gabriel Rockhill, “Le Cinéma n’est jamais né,” Appareil 1 (2008): 26, https://doi.org/10.4000/appareil.130.

56. Siegfried Zielinski, Variations on Media Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media.

57. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Erkki Huhtamo, Illusion in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

58. Vivian Sobchack, “Afterword: Media Archaeology and Re-Presencing the Past,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

59. Tom Gunning, introduction to Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow.

60. Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

61. See Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

62. This explains how the rumor that Jesuits were planning on colonizing the Moon in the 1620s became credible (see chapter 1).

63. According to William B. Ashworth Jr., from the 1550s to the 1650s the “emblematic world view” dominated natural history through “the belief that every kind of thing in the cosmos has myriad hidden meanings” through secret connections, so that “the notion that a peacock should be studied in isolation from the rest of the universe” made little sense. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 312.

64. Cristina Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift (New York: Routledge, 2016).

65. Faith E. Beasley, “Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal,” in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, ed. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

66. François Bernier, “Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent,” Journal des Sçavans 12 (1684): 132.

67. Robert Bernasconi, “Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process: Race as Border Concept,” Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012): 206–28. For Justin E. H. Smith, Bernier’s classification was “the biogeographical starting point for the determination of geopolitical order” (Nature, Human Nature & Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015], 143). See also Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 20–21.

68. Siep Stuurman, “François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification,” History Workshop Journal 50 (2000): 1–21.

69. François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, 2nd ed., vol. 4 (Lyon, France: Anisson, Posuel & Rigaud, 1684), 361, 363.

70. François Bernier, “Des climats & de la diversité des habitants de la Terre,” in Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi.

71. For the reconstruction of human pigmentation history, see William J. Pavan and Richard A. Sturm, “The Genetics of Human Skin and Hair Pigmentation,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 20 (2019): 41–72.

72. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxviii.

73. Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 10–16.

74. Saidiya Hartman documents the public staging of Black life via “coerced spectacles” in which “blacks were envisioned fundamentally as vehicles for white enjoyment” (Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 23). Calvin L. Warren presents this simulacral operation as an ontological law of modernity: the double imperative “to see the invisible” in order “not to see black being” (Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018], 70). Warren’s double bind is partly based on Hortense J. Spillers’s insight that “undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing of skin color” (Hortense J. Spillers, White, Black, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 207, quoted in Warren, Ontological Terror, 71). See chapter 3 for hieroglyphs and race in photoimaging.

75. [Benjamin Banneker], Copy of a Letter from Benjamin Banneker to the Secretary of State, with His Answer (Philadelphia: Daniel Lawrence, 1792).

76. For Douglass, see chapter 6. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109; Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 189–94.

77. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 76.

78. See Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

79. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetic of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 18.

80. Fred Moten, Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 194; Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media, 25–27.

81. Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 3.

82. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 170.

83. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 162.

84. Oxford English Dictionary, “matrix,” last updated December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9397880093.

85. La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 6.

86. Nicholas Whittaker, “Case Sensitive: Why We Shouldn’t Capitalize ‘Black,’” Drift, September 17, 2021, https://www.thedriftmag.com/case-sensitive/.

87. Fred Moten, “Chromatic Saturation: The Case of Blackness,” in The Universal Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

88. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Joseph Crookshank, 1787), 131.

1. Antoni Malet, “Early Conceptualizations of the Telescope as an Optical Instrument,” Early Science and Medicine 10, no. 2 (2005): 237–62.

2. Ambassades du Roy de Siam envoyé à L’Excellence du Prince Maurice, arrivé à la Haye le 10 Septembre 1608 (N.p., 1608), 9. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

3. State representatives of France, Spain, Holland, and the Vatican understood the telescope as a powerful new military technology. In December 1608, Pierre Jeannin said a French soldier had mastered the art of telescope-making. Quoted in Engel Sluiter, “The Telescope Before Galileo,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 27 (1997): 228.

4. For global Dutch ambitions, see Robert Parthesius, Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Shipping Network in Asia 1595–1660 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).

5. See, for instance, Dhruv Raina, “French Jesuit Scientists in India: Historical Astronomy in the Discourse on India, 1670–1770,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 5 (1999): 30–38.

6. Jean-Jacques Gautier, Jean le Noir ou le misanthrope (Paris: Hôtel de Bouthillier, 1789), 82.

7. See Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

8. See Anne T. Woolett and Ariane van Suchtelen, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), 94.

9. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter, England: Exeter University Press, 2000), 5–6.

10. For Daniele Barbaro’s La pratica della perspettiva (1567), see Vincent Llardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), 220–21.

11. Tiemen Cocuyt, “The Camera Obscura and the Availability of Seventeenth Century Optics,” in Inside the Camera Obscura: Optics and Art Under the Spell of the Projected Image, ed. Wolfgang Lefèvre (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2007).

12. John Gorman, “Projecting Nature in Early Modern Europe,” in Lefèvre, Inside the Camera Obscura, 35.

13. From a 1621 text by astronomer Jean Leurechon, cited in Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, 12.

14. Johann Zahn, Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive telescopium (Herbi Poli, Germany: Quirinus Heyl, 1685).

15. Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, “Nature’s Drawing: Problems and Resolutions in the Mathematization of Motion,” in Baroque Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

16. Kathleen M. Crowther and Peter Barker, “Training the Intelligent Eye: Understanding Illustrations in Early Modern Astronomy Texts,” Isis 104, no. 3 (2013): 447–48.

17. For motion visualization in late seventeenth-century mechanics, see Michael S. Mahoney, “Infinitesimals and Transcendent Relations: The Mathematics of Motion in the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

18. Omar W. Nasim, Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 6, 10, 18.

19. See Norma Wenczel, “The Optical Camera Obscura II: Images and Texts,” in Lefèvre, Inside the Camera Obscura, 27–29.

20. See Catherine Chevalley, “L’Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae d’Athanase Kircher: Néoplatonisme, hermétisme et ‘nouvelle philosophie,’” Baroque 12 (1987): http://baroque.revues.org/584; Roberto Buonanno, The Stars of Galileo Galilei and the Universal Knowledge of Athanasius Kircher (New York: Springer, 2014).

21. Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow.

22. John E. Fletcher, “Astronomy in the Life and Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher,” Isis 61, no. 1 (1970): 64.

23. John Glassie, A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), 98, 149.

24. Athanasii Kircheri, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae in decem Libros digesta (Roma: Sumptibus Hermanni Scheus, 1646), 840–70.

25. Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Joannes Jansson & Elizeus Weyerstraet, 1665), 327, cited in Hiro Hirai, “Kircher’s Chymical Interpretation of the Creation and Spontaneous Generation,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principle (Sagamore Beach, MA: Watson Publishing, 2007), 79, 82.

26. See Dominique Demange and Yael Kedar, “Physical Action, Species, and Matter: The Debate Between Roger Bacon and Peter John Olivi,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 58, no. 1 (2020): 49–69.

27. A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 248–55.

28. Christoph Scheiner, Oculus hoc est: Fundamentum Opticum, in quo ex accurata Oculi Anatome, abstrusarum experientiarum sedula pervestigatione, ex invisis specierum visibilium tam everso quam erecto situ spectaculis, necnon solidis rationum momentis Radius Visualis eruitur; sua Visioni in Oculo sedes decernitur; Anguli Visorii ingenium aperitur [The eye, that is, the foundation of optics, in which the visual ray is extracted from the accurate anatomy of the eye, the diligent investigation of difficult experiments, the unseen spectacles of visible species both inverted and upright, as well as true instances of reason; its visual seat in the eye is determined; and the natural angle of vision revealed] (Innsbruck, Austria: Daniel Agricola, 1619).

29. Jean Tarde, Les Astres de Borbon, et apologie pour le soleil (Paris: Jean Gesselin, 1627), 8 (my translation).

30. [Antonie van] Leeuwenhoek, “Microscopical Observations,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 112 (1675): 379.

31. Isaac Newton, Opticks (London: Smith & Walford, 1704), 136.

32. For crossovers of species between vision and race, see Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Influences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 218fn25; Juliana Chow, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 36.

33. Johannes Hevelius, Selenographia: Sive lunae descriptio (Gdańsk, Poland: Hünefeld, 1647).

34. See Kathrin Müller, “How to Craft Telescopic Observations in a Book: Hevelius’s Selenographia (1647) and Its Images,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 41 (2010): 355–79.

35. Because of its orbital libration (a slight figure-eight motion), the Moon exposes 59 percent of its surface to earthly observers, from 8 to 50 percent at a time.

36. Johannes Hevelius, Cometographia (Gdańsk, Poland: S. Reiniger, 1668); Patrick Feaster, “Early Motion Pictures of Eclipses (1639–1880),” Griffonage-Dot-Com (blog), March 30, 2017, https://griffonagedotcom.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/early-motion-pictures-of-eclipses-1639-1880/. Selenographia’s very long Latin subtitle affirms that “the native faces [nativa facies] of all other planets . . . most accurately cut from the air are placed under view [sub aspectum ponuntur].”

37. Alan E. Shapiro, “Images: Real and Virtual, Projected and Perceived, from Kepler to Dechales,” Early Science and Medicine 13, no. 3 (2008): 270–312.

38. Jill H. Casid reminds us that the magic lantern likely existed already (Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015], 55). Huygens lists the magic lantern among instruments usable for solar eclipse and sunspot observation (61).

39. Michael Barth, “Huygens at Work: Annotations in His Rediscovered Copy of Hooke’s Micrographia,” Annals of Science 52 (1995): 603.

40. See Allan Chapman, “‘Micrographia’ on the Moon,” Astronomy and Geophysics 56, no. 5 (2015): 23–29.

41. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (London: John Martyn and James Allestry, 1665), iv.

42. Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison, “Truth-to-Nature,” in Objectivity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

43. For Wren, see Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 43–47; J. A. Bennett, The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 74–75.

44. Gregorio Astengo, “Parallelogrammum Prosopographicum,” Nexus Network Journal 22 (2020): 735–53, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00004-020-00497-x.

45. George Sinclair, “Parallelogrammum Prosopographicum . . . ,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 8, no. 96 (July 1673): 6080–85.

46. The Encyclopédie under “Objectif” indicates: “One can also simply say the objective [l’objectif].” Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds., L’Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., vol. 11 (1765), 301.

47. Hooke, Micrographia, 4; Oxford English Dictionary, “objective,” last updated March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9609347108.

48. The original theological context for objective was progressively supplanted by its optical meaning. When an exegete of Gassendi writes in 1654 of “the Objective presence of all things at once, to the Divine Intellect,” the transition from theology to optics is palpable (Walter Charleton, Physiologica Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana; or, The Fabrick of Science Natural upon the Thesis of Atoms [London: Newcomb, 1654], 82). For how symbolism and ideology warped the perceptual understanding and simulation of perspective, see James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

49. For depth relations in Hooke’s work, see Christa Knellwolf, “Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and the Aesthetics of Empiricism,” Seventeenth Century 16, no. 1 (2001): 177–200; Meghan C. Doherty, “Discovering the ‘True Form’: Hooke’s Micrographia and the Visual Vocabulary of Engraved Portraits,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 66, no. 3 (2012): 211–34. See also Hunter, Wicked Intelligence, chaps. 1 and 2.

50. Meghan C. Doherty points to Hooke’s familiarity with the “visual vocabulary developed by engravers for translating a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional representation.” “Discovering the ‘True Form,’” 211.

51. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (London: A. Maxwell, 1668), 34. For race in Cavendish’s celestial journey, see Cristina Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift (New York: Routledge, 2016), 123–34.

52. Margaret Cavendish, Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666), cited in Sujata Iyengar, “Royalist, Romanticist, Racialist: Rank, Gender, and Race in the Science and Fiction of Margaret Cavendish,” ELH: English Literary History 69, no. 3 (2002): 655.

53. Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color, 13, 44, 65–66; Jeremy Robin Schneider, “The First Mite: Insect Genealogies in Hooke’s Micrographia,” Annals of Science 75, no. 3 (2018): 192n111.

54. See Mechthild Fend, “Skin Colour,” in Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2016).

55. Mari-Tere Álvarez, “Moon Shot: From Renaissance Imagination to Modern Reality,” in Renaissance Futurities: Science, Art, Invention, ed. Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). For Moon fictions (with race entirely omitted), see Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

56. See below and Eileen Reeves, “Jesuits on the Moon,” in Evening News: Optics, Astronomy, and Journalism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

57. Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy, trans. with commentary by Edward Rosen (New York: Dover, 2003), 12.

58. See Frédérique Aït-Touati, “Penser le ciel à l’âge Classique: Fiction, hypothèse et astronomie de Kepler à Huygens,” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 65, no. 2 (2010): 325–44. Frédérique Aït-Touati terms lunar observers of Earth “geoscopes” (338).

59. Kepler, Somnium, 133. Kepler consulted chronicles from the West Indies (Kepler’s Somnium, 133fn357). For Kepler, blackness is an excess rather than a lack because “light destroys matter” and “has more to remove in black things” (72fn146). This corresponds to the model of Black skin as an extra layer of tegument, ascribing “thick skin” to enslaved Black people and rationalizing inhumane mistreatment.

60. Raz Chen-Morris, “Shadows of Instruction: Optics and Classical Authorities in Kepler’s Somnium,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 2 (2005): 225, 242.

61. For the implications of the Copernican revolution for racialization, see Sylvia Wynter. Race figures rarely in critical analyses of seventeenth-century astronomical rationality. An exception is Mary Baine Campbell, “Impossible Voyages: Seventeenth-Century Space Travel and the Impulse of Ethnology,” Literature and History 6, no. 2 (1997): 1–17.

62. Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone, ed. William Poole (1638; Toronto: Broadview, 2009), 76.

63. See Alexander Hugo Schulenburg, “Transient Observations: The Textualizing of St Helena Through Five Hundred Years of Colonial Discourse” (PhD diss., University of St Andrews, 1999), 184–85.

64. In 1638, John Wilkins, a future cofounder of the Royal Society, published a pro-heliocentric treatise: The Discovery of a World in the Moone, or A Discourse Tending to Prove That ‘Tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in That Planet (London: Michael Sparl & Edward Forrest, 1638). In the second edition, he asserted that “Colonies” on the Moon would bring “inconceivably” more “Pleasure and Profit” than the “Discoveries in America,” underlining the overall colonial mindset of lunar speculations. John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning a New World & Another Planet, 2nd ed. (London: John Maynard, 1640), 206, 242. See David Cressy, “Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon,” American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (2006): 961–82.

65. In the second edition, Godwin added an essay on telegraphy, “The Inanimate Messenger,” an expression synonymous with our “media.” Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone; or, A Discourse of a Voyage Thither, 2nd ed. (London: Joshua Kirton, 1657).

66. Cyrano de Bergerac, Histoire comique, contenant les Estats & Empires de la Lune (Paris: Charles de Sercy, 1657), 2 (unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own). In the preface, Cyrano claims ruefully that his book provides “as large an increase of goods for the Republic of Letters as the discovery of New lands was useful for old ones” (n.p.).

67. The 1687 English translation renders “les yeux sont inutiles, on n’a besoin que des oreilles [eyes are useless, only ears are required]” by the ominous formula “made wholly for the Ears and not the Eyes” (Cyrano Bergerac, The Comical History, trans. A. Lovell [London: Henry Rhodes, 1687], 121). I return to this formula made famous by Thomas Edison in chapter 7.

68. See, for instance, H. van Hetten [Jean Leurechon?], Récréation mathématique (Pont-à-Mousson, France: Jean Appier Hanzelet, 1626).

69. The oppositions of civilized versus uncivilized language, phonic versus graphic meaning, verbal language versus music, and, finally, writing versus speech point to “silent black materiality” and the “aural aesthesis” or “phonic substance” that, for Fred Moten, haunt optical media. Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the Photograph,” in In the Break: The Aesthetic of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 197, 203.

70. [Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle], Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Paris: Veuve C. Blageart), 1686 (unless noted, all translations are my own). Alain Niderst lists Fontenelle’s verbatim borrowings from François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, 2nd ed., vol. 4 (Lyon, France: Anisson, Posuel & Rigaud, 1684) (Fontenelle à la recherche de lui-même [1657–1702] [Paris: Nizet, 1972], 107). See Jean Dagen, “Fontenelle et l’épicurisme,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 103, no. 2 (2003): 397–414.

71. For dialogues as a new educational genre addressed to women, see Juliette Cherbuliez, “On Letting Sleeping Blonds Lie: Gender, Leisure Literature, and the Imagination in Fontenelle,” Romanic Review 102, no. 1–2 (2011): 145–68.

72. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

73. Madame Deloge de la Mézange was a close friend of Fontenell’s, and he sojourned at her castle. Deloge was interested in skin color change and protogenetics. The physiologist Claude-Nicolas Le Cat mentions a “eugenic” experiment in which she was involved: The gray spots on a white male dog were painted orange-brown, and the puppies it had with a black-and-white female were reported to have been black, white, and orange-brown. Le Cat adds that she kept one of the puppies and had its portrait painted. Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, Traité de la couleur de la peau humaine en général, et de celle des nègres en particulier, et de la métamorphose d’une de ces couleurs en l’autre, soit de naissance, soit naturellement (Amsterdam: n.p., 1765), 19.

74. The Code Noir commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1682 was drafted by two colonial officials who uniformized disparate local practices (see Vernon Valentine Palmer, “The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir,” Louisiana Law Review 56 [1995]: 363–406). Prior to Newton, the Heavens and Earth were not thought to share uniform mechanical laws according to Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris (Baroque Science, chaps. 4 and 5). They describe Newton’s work as “the human enforcement of mathematical order on a messy nature” (184). (See also, Nicholas Campion, “Astronomy and Culture in the Eighteenth Century: Isaac Newton’s Influence on the Enlightenment and Politics,” Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 16, no. 4 [2016]: 497–502). Newton’s reorganization of silver coinage in England after the East India Company’s silver devalued home currency attests to his global purview (see Allison Margaret Bigelow, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020], 2–3). Denise Ferreira da Silva theorizes Newton’s contribution as a global field of forces: “The plenum is now inhabited by moving things, bodies, which obey the invisible forces or powers that determine how they affect and how they are affected by other bodies” (Toward a Global Idea of Race [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007], 48).

75. Tryon quoted in Philippe Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2004): 609–42.

76. “A Discourse in a Way of a Dialogue, Between an Ethiopian or Negro-Slave and a Christian, That Was His Master in America,” in Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (London: Andrew Sowle, 1684), 148–49.

77. Gabriel Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes (Paris: Veuve Simon Bénard, 1690), 46 (unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own).

78. Justin E. H. Smith, “Gabriel Daniel: Descartes Through the Mirror of Fiction,” in The Oxford Handbook on Descartes and Cartesianism, ed. Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). The Jesuit order nominally rejected slavery (see Timothy J. Reiss, “Descartes’s Silences on Slavery and Race,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005]).

79. M. de Fontenelle, A Discovery of New Worlds, trans. A. Behn (London: William Canning, 1688).

80. Aphra Behn, Emperor of the Moon: A Farce (London: R. Holt, 1687), 59.

81. See Catherine Ingrassia, “Aphra Behn, Captivity, and Emperor of the Moon,” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 41, no. 2 (2017): 53–67.

82. François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, Oeuvres, vol. 4 (Paris: Didot, 1787), 571–72 (unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own).

83. Fénelon outlines elsewhere his approach to “correct” imaging: “[Water] receives without alteration all the images of various objects, and it keeps none of them. The pure and tranquil soul is the same. God imprints his image on it and that of all other objects that he wishes to imprint. Everything is imprinted; everything is erased. . . . Everything disappears as in water as soon as God wishes to make new impressions.” Fénelon: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Chad Helms (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2006), 278 (my translation).

1. For both real and fictional racial shifting, see Katy L. Chiles, Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphosis in the Literature of Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

2. Alan W. Hirshfeld, Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos (New York: Dover, 2013), 157.

3. Quoted in Laurence Bobis and James Lequeux, “Cassini, Rømer and the Velocity of Light,” Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 11, no. 2 (2008): 100.

4. Jean Deschamps, Court abrégé de philosophie wolffienne (Amsterdam and Leipzig: Arkstée et Merkus, 1743), 23 (my translation).

5. Maupertuis, Oeuvres de Mr. de Maupertuis, 4 vols. (Lyon, France: Jean-Marie Bruyset, 1756), 1:26, 226 (unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own).

6. J. B. Shank, “The Invention of French Newtonianism: Maupertuis and Voltaire,” in The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

7. It was known since a 1670s expedition to Peru that clocks were slower near the equator, a crucial argument for the equatorial bulge.

8. Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 87–188.

9. Mary Terrall, “Mathematics and Mechanics in the Paris Academy of Sciences,” in The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

10. Maupertuis, Discours sur les différentes figures des Astres (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1732), 46.

11. Maupertuis, “Essai de cosmologie,” in Oeuvres, 1:xiv.

12. See Ansgar Lissy, “L’Économie de la nature: Maupertuis et Euler sur le principe de moindre action,” Philosophiques 42, no. 1 (2015): 37–38.

13. In an essay on the origins of language, Maupertuis explores psychological “duration [durée]” in pre-Bergsonian terms: “But could not immense times have elapsed between two perceptions that I would consider as following closely on each other?” Oeuvres, 1:285.

14. This debate focuses on visual reproduction as well. Preformist Leibniz had a predilection for the pantograph inflecting models of human reproduction. Matthew Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 208. For epigenesis, see Terrall, Man Who Flattened the Earth; Stéphane Schmitt, “Mécanisme et épigenèse: Les conceptions de Bourguet et Maupertuis sur la génération,” Dix-Huitième Siècle 46, no. 1 (2014): 477–99.

15. See Terrall, Man Who Flattened the Earth, 211–20. Maupertuis connects biological and chemical growth in System of Nature: An Essay on the Formation of Organized Bodies ([1751] in Oeuvres, 2:139–68), arguing that “elements themselves, endowed with intelligence, arrange and gather themselves [s’arrangent & s’unissent] in order to fulfill the aims of the Creator” (168). The French “remplir les vues” means “fulfill the aims” but also “fill up the views,” combining teleology and visualization. Denis Diderot took such vitalism to be a frightening “universal copulation” (172, all translations my own). Maupertuis, “Réponse aux objections de M. Diderot,” in Oeuvres, 2:169–84; Charles T. Wolfe, “Endowed Molecules and Emergent Organization: The Maupertuis-Diderot Debate,” Early Science and Medicine 15, nos. 1–2 (2010): 38–65.

16. See Andrew Curran, “Rethinking Race History: The Role of the Albino in the French Enlightenment Life Sciences,” History and Theory 48 (2009): 151–79.

17. On Johann Nicolas Pechlin and Albinus, see [Maupertuis], Vénus physique contenant deux dissertations, l’une sur l’origine des Hommes et des Animaux; et l’autre sur l’origine des Noirs (La Haye, Netherlands: Jean Martin Husson, 1746), 117fnA. See also Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science & Slavery in the Age of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Craig Koslofsky, “Superficial Blackness? Johann Nicolas Pechlin’s De Habitu et Colore Aethiopum Qui Vulgo Nigritae (1677),” Journal of Early Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2018): 140–58.

18. Maupertuis’s monogenism contrasts with the polygenism of his nemesis Voltaire. In 1734, Voltaire penned a metaphysical treatise in which an extraterrestrial rejects monogenism after a flyover of Earth. Nicholas Cronk et al., Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, 20C (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017).

19. See Bronwen Douglas, “Notes on ‘Race’ and the Biologisation of Human Difference,” Journal of Pacific History 40, no. 3 (2005): 331–38. For the influence of Maupertuis’s theory of generation on Buffon, David Hume, and Erasmus Darwin, see Peter Knox-Shaw, “Hume’s ‘Farther Scenes’: Maupertuis and Buffon in the Dialogues,” Hume Studies 34, no. 2 (2008): 209–30.

20. Le Code noir ou Édit du Roy (Paris: Claude Girard, 1735), 5. See Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

21. In her otherwise impeccable intellectual biography of Maupertuis, Mary Terrall surprisingly omits this fact. See Philippe Haudrère, “L’origine du personnel de direction générale de la Compagnie française des Indes, 1719–1794,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 248 (1980): 356; René Kerviler, La Bretagne à l’Académie française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1889), 287.

22. Maupertuis, “Lettre sur l’âme des bêtes,” in Oeuvres, 2:218.

23. We know only of Wright that he invented a quadrant for Moon observation in 1733 (the pannauticon) and published Universal Architecture (1755) on building and grotto design (Michael Hoskin and George D. Rochester, “Thomas Wright and the Royal Society,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 23 [1992]: 167–72). He was a pansophist and a freemason and had a speech impediment (Judy Preston, “A Polymath in Arcadia: Thomas Wright (1711–86),” Garden History 38, no. 2 [2010]: 159–76).

24. Thomas Wright of Durham, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe Founded upon the Laws of Nature and Solving by Mathematical Principles the General Phaenomena of the Visible Creation and Particularly the Via Lactea (London: H. Chapelle, 1750), 1fn.

25. William Hastie, ed. and trans., Kant’s Cosmogony (Glasgow: John Maclehose and Sons, 1900), 204–5.

26. Simon Schaffer, “The Phoenix of Nature: Fire and Evolutionary Cosmology in Wright and Kant,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 (1978): 180–200.

27. Wright claims he observed the Great Comet of 1744 in a telescope (Original Theory, 40). But the magnification of his drawing far exceeds what reflectors of the time could discern, so he likely extrapolated from descriptions of the comet’s head and “parabolic” hoods found in Jean-Philippe Loÿs de Chéseaux, Traité de la comète (Genève, Switzerland: Marc-Michel Bousquet, 1744), 145–47.

28. J. H. Lambert, La Perspective affranchie du plan géométral (Zürich, Switzerland: Heidegguer, 1759).

29. Johann Heinrich Lambert, Photometria, sive de Mensura et Gradibus Luminis, Colorum et Umbrae (Augsburg, Germany: Klett, 1760).

30. [Johann Heinrich] Lambert, The System of the World, trans. James Jacque (London: Vernor and Hood, 1800), 16. For visualization, see Maarten Bullynck, “Johann Lambert’s Scientific Tool Kit,” Science in Context 23, no. 1 (2010): 65–89; [Johann Heinrich] Lambert, “Construction d’une échelle ballistique,” Nouveaux mémoires de l’académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres (1773): 34–41.

31. Immanuel Kant, “Thoughts of the True Estimation of Living Forces . . . ,” in Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 103.

32. Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or Essay on the Constitution and Mechanical Origin of the Whole Universe According to Newtonian Principles, trans. William Hastie (1900; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Immanuel Kant, “Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,” in Natural Science, by Immanuel Kant, ed. Eric Watkins, trans. Lewis White Beck et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) (I cite from this edition).

33. For Kant’s knowledge of and thought about magic lanterns, see Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013).

34. Michela Massimi states that Maupertuis is the source of Kant’s nebular theory (“Kant’s Dynamical Theory of Matter in 1755, and Its Debt to Speculative Newtonian Experimentalism,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 42 [2011]: 525–43). According to Michael Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 485n125), Stanley Jaki, who translated The Universal Natural History of the Heavens, considers that Kant copied a passage from Maupertuis’s Elements of Geography (1742) about the flattening of Earth (Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History of the Heavens, trans. and ed. Stanley L. Jaki [Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981], 273n26.)

35. See Martin Schonfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 82–83.

36. That expression figures on his letterhead. Maurice Bessy and Lo Duca, Georges Méliès (Paris: Prisma, 1945), 132.

37. Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1734): “Superior Beings, when of late they saw / A mortal Man unfold all Nature’s Law, / Admir’d such Wisdom in an earthly shape, / And show’d a NEWTON, as we show an Ape.” Schonfeld, Philosophy of the Young Kant, 123.

38. Cited in Jon M. Mikkelsen, “Recent Works on Kant’s Race Theory,” in Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-Century Writings, trans. and ed. Jon M. Mikkelsen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 8.

39. See Bernard Boxill, “Kantian Racism and Kantian Teleology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 45.

40. Immanuel Kant, “Physical Geography,” in Natural Science, 573–74.

41. On this point, see Sally Hatch Gray, “Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color,” Eighteenth Century 53, no. 4 (2012): 393–412.

42. See Robert J. Richards, “Kant and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb: A Historical Misunderstanding,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31, no. 1 (2000): 11–32.

43. Michela Massimi, “The Legacy of Newton for the Pre-Critical Kant,” in The Oxford Handbook of Newton, ed. C. Smeenk and E. Schliesser, online ed. (Oxford Academic, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199930418.001.0001. Friedman points out that Kant was also interested in Euler’s optical theory for his model of ether. Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature, 195fn151.

44. James Delbourgo, “The Newtonian Slave Body: Racial Enlightenment in the Atlantic World,” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives 9, no. 2 (2012): 185–207. Mitchell’s essay in answer to the infamous 1743 contest by the Académie de Bordeaux (the second city in France for the slave trade)—“What is the physical cause of the color of negroes, the nature of their hair, and the degeneration of both?”—set aside prior explanations as fantastic and prejudicial, explaining skin color through anatomy and Newtonian optics. He deemed that white skin was actually “white” and “transparent” while “the Skins of Negroes transmit no color” and hence is pure black—another instance of optical physiology. The cause of Blackness is simply that “the Skin [of Negroes] is deprived of its white Colour,” for lack of clothing, housing, and refinements (John Mitchell, “An Essay upon the Causes of the Different Colours of People in Different Climates,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 43 [1744]: 133). Mitchell considered Black and white people equally degenerated from an original middle-color complexion in Middle Eastern ancestors (147–48).

45. See Alan E. Shapiro, “The Evolving Structure of Newton’s Theory of White Light and Color,” Isis 71, no. 2 (1980): 211–35.

46. Isaac Newton, Opticks, vol. 1 (London: Smith & Walford, 1704), 106.

47. Immanuel Kant, “Of the Different Human Races: An Announcement (1775),” in Mikkelsen, Kant and the Concept of Race, 54.

48. Johann Gottlieb von Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (1784; New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966), 166.

49. David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 168–71.

50. For Kant’s racialization as invested in technics of visuality, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 60–61; David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2019), 51; Achille Mbembe, The Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

51. Michael Hoskin, Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

52. See Simon Schaffer, “Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science 13, no. 3 (1980): 211–39. For religious implications, see Michael Hoskin, “William Herschel and God,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 45, no. 2 (2014): 247–52.

53. William Herschel compares his telescopic observation of nebulae with playing George Frideric Handel’s fugues. Schaffer, “Herschel in Bedlam,” 216.

54. 5/12 to 5/14, “Telescopes,” Papers of William Herschel, 1936, GBR/0180/RGO 35/170/22, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK.

55. Joseph Priestley’s 1772 The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours was influential for William Herschel’s ideas about light. Simon Schaffer, “‘The Great Laboratories of the Universe’: William Herschel on Matter Theory and Planetary Life,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 (1980): 81.

56. William Herschel, “Catalogue of a Second Thousand of New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars; with a Few Introductory Remarks on the Construction of the Heavens,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 79 (January 1, 1789): 213. See Omar Nasim, Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 26–27.

57. “Appendix to the Paper on the Power of Penetrating into Space by Telescope,” Papers of William Herschel, RGO 35/170/23, 75, Cambridge University Library.

58. See Serena Keshavjee, “‘La Vie renaissant de la mort’: Albert Besnard’s ‘Non-Miraculous’ History of Creation,” in Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture, ed. Fae Brauer and Serena Keshavjee (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).

59. From the 1770s on, Bode worked with Lambert on the Astronomisches Jahrbuch and was a close acquaintance of Kan’s. In a 1781 letter, Kant mentions that his and Lambert’s cosmologies were reviewed in Bode’s new edition of Anleitung zur Kenntnis des gestirnten Himmels (Introduction to the knowledge of the starry heavens) (Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, trans. Arnulf Zweig [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 184–85). Starting in 1783, Bode corresponded with William Herschel (Index to the Correspondence of William Herschel A-C, RAS MSS Herschel W.1/BODE, Johann Elert [1747–1826], July 9, 1783, 13.B.104, Royal Astronomical Society Library, London). In 1788, Bode compared Lambert’s and Kant’s systems with the Herschels’ (M. Bode, “Observations sur la distribution des nébuleuses et des groupes d’étoiles dans le firmament,” in Mémoires de l’académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Berlin, 1794–5 [1788; Berlin: George Decker, 1799]). A French commentator of Kant well informed of his philosophy and cosmology states that William Herschel even translated Kant’s Universal Natural History into English (Nicolas-Louis François de Neuchâteau, Le Conservateur, ou recueil de morceaux inédits, vol. 2 [Paris: Crapelet, 1799], 32–35).

60. William Herschel, “On the Construction of the Heavens,” Transactions of the Royal Society 75 (1785): 253.

61. William Herschel, “On the Proper Motion of the Sun and Solar System,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 73 (January 1, 1783): 243.

62. Edwin Hubble’s 1930s discovery of the red shift in spectrographs reinstated proper motion and hastened the theory of the Big Bang. But for roughly 150 years, the universe had no overarching movement.

63. See the Illustris project, a digital simulation—indeed, a film—of seven billion years of cosmic evolution with an Oculus-like mobile point of view (https://www.illustris-project.org/).

64. See royal astronomer Alexis-Marie Rochon, who traveled to Morocco, India, Madagascar, and the southern Atlantic and Pacific Islands. He built a new prismatic micrometer and was placed in charge of the King’s collection of instruments. Danielle Fauque, “Alexis-Marie Rochon (1741–1817), savant, astronome, et opticien,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 38, no. 1 (1985): 3–36.

65. Christopher J. Berry, “Adam Smith and Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 117.

66. Adam Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. Joseph Black and James Hutton (London: Cadell & Davies, 1795), 15.

67. See Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricism of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 114–15. Riskin documents the correspondence between Franklin, Barbeu-Dubourg, and Joseph Priestley mixing slavery, politics, and physics.

68. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, Chronographie, ou description des tems; contenant toute la suite des Souverains de l’Univers, & des principaux événements de chaque siècle, depuis la Création du monde jusqu’à présent (Paris: chez l’auteur, 1753).

69. Denis Diderot, “Chronologique (machine),” in L’Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, vol. 3 (1765), 400–01; Stephen Ferguson, “The 1753 Carte chronographique of Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 52 (1990–1991): 190–230. The Torah scroll was clearly the model, as Barbeu-Dubourg was the French authority for Old Testament translations (Paul Delaunay, “Vieux médecins mayennais: Barbeu Du Bourg,” Bulletin de la Commission historique et archéologique de la Mayenne 19 [1903]: 16).

70. Cited in Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg: A French Disciple of Benjamin Franklin,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95, no. 4 (1951): 346–47.

71. Eran Shalev, “‘A Republic Amidst the Stars’: Political Astronomy and the Intellectual Origins of the Stars and Stripes,” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 1 (2011): 39–73. The red-and-white broad stripes of the flag come from the navy flag of the British East India Company.

72. [Thomas Paine], Common Sense Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia: W. and T. Bradford, 1776), 45.

73. David Rittenhouse, An Oration Delivered February 24, 1775 Before the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia, for Promoting Useful Knowledge (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1775), 8–20.

74. Brooke Hindle, David Rittenhouse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 112.

75. When shown Banneker’s corrections of two well-known astronomy manuals, Rittenhouse was very impressed, adding, “considering the colour of the Author.” Banneker retorted: “I am annoyed that the subject of my race is so much stressed: the work is either correct or it is not.” Charles A. Cerami, Benjamin Banneker: Surveyor, Astronomer, Publisher, Patriot (New York: John Willey, 2002), 136, 150. For Banneker, see Britt Rusert, “The Banneker Age: Black Afterlives of Early National Science,” in Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

76. Jean-Nicolas Rieucau, “Condorcet’s Science Obscured: Shadows Cast by the Enlightenment,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 32 (2004): 82–106.

77. M. Schwartz [Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet], Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Société typographique, 1781).

78. For a critique of Condorcet, see Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139–58.

79. Condorcet, “Sur l’Admission des femmes au droit de cité,” Journal de la société de 1789 5 (July 3, 1789): 2.

80. Condorcet worked on a global history of knowledge since the 1770s. See Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

81. Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, new ed. (Paris: Bibliothèque choisie, 1829), 7; Marquis de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 3–4.

82. L. M. Henriquez, Voyage et adventures de Frondeabus, fils d’Herschell, dans la cinquième partie du monde, ouvrage traduit de la langue Herschellique (Paris: Cailleau, 1799).

83. Mercure de France: Journal littéraire et politique 7 (Paris: Cailleau, 1799): 108–11; Magasin encyclopédique ou journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts 5 (Paris: Fuchs, 1801): 430.

1. See François Brunet, The Birth of the Idea of Photography, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).

2. Reputed experimentalist and theoretician Hermann von Helmholtz still attributed the origin of all forces to the Sun in the 1860s. Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 211.

3. For pictures or images analyzable as chemical objects rather than as visual representations, see Matthew C. Hunter, Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 18–19, 39–40.

4. For the importance of the Caribbean buccaneer and maroon communities, see Julius C. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso, 2018).

5. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus convincingly propose that poisoning resulted from ergotism in stale wheat due to the wartime disruption of wheat deliveries. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 97–136.

6. Maria Alessandra Bollettino, “Slavery, War, and Britain’s Atlantic Empire: Black Soldiers and Rebels in the Seven Years’ War” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2009).

7. Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020), 11.

8. Marjoleine Kars, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New York: New Press, 2022).

9. Torture involved scientific tools like magic lanterns and electric shocks. Kieran Murphy, “Haiti and the Black Box of Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism 56, no. 1 (2017): 41.

10. Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 79, 116–18, 121–24. For the rise of the Euro-African diaspora or “habitants,” see James F. Searing, “The Seven Years’ War in West Africa: The End of Company Rule and the Emergence of the Habitants,” in The Seven Years’ War: Global Views, ed. Mark H. Danley and Patrick J. Speelman (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012).

11. Gene E. Ogle, “‘The Eternal Power of Reason’ and ‘The Superiority of Whites’: Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Colonial Enlightenment,” French Colonial History 3 (2003): 43.

12. For instance, see Abbé [Lazzaro] Spallanzani, Essay on Animal Reproductions, trans. M. Matty (London: T. Becket, 1769).

13. For instance, Abbé Poncelet, La Nature dans la formation du tonnerre et la reproduction des êtres vivants, vol. 1 (Paris: Le Mercier, 1766). The expression sexual reproduction is associated with Erasmus Darwin in Zoonomia (1794) and “The Temple of Nature” (1803). We find reproduction des espèces in Journal de politique et de littérature (Brussels: n.p., 1776), 1:468. In a 1780 book on plants of Paris, we find reproduction de l’espèce (M. Bulliard, Flora Parisiensis [Paris: Didot, 1780], 5:631). We find the expression procédés techniques de reproduction (mechanical reproduction process) in legal proceedings of 1826 (Commission de la propriété littéraire [Paris: Pillet, 1826], 287). T. K. Hervey mentions “the reproduction, in every form, of these specimens [of sculpture]” (“Illustrations of Modern Sculpture,” Literary Gazette 795 [April 14, 1832]: 240). “The State of the Art of Lithography” mentions “the reproduction of original sketches and drawings by the hundreds and thousands” (Art-Union 6 [July 15, 1839]: 97).

14. See Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner, eds., The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015).

15. Louis de la Caze, Idée de l’homme physique et moral pour servir d’Introduction à un traité de médecine (Paris: Guérin et Delatour, 1760), 87.

16. Denis Diderot, “Génération (physiologie),” in L’Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, vol. 7 (1757), 572–73.

17. Buffon, Histoire naturelle (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1749), 2:35–53.

18. [Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche], Giphantie (Paris: Durand, 1760) (I cite from this edition; all translations are my own); Giphantia, or A View of What Has Passed, What Is Now Passing, and, During the Present Century, What Will Pass in the World (London: Robert Horsfield, 1761) (Horsfield also published Granville Sharp’s 1769 A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery); T. L. R., Giphantie oder die Erdbeschauung (Ulm, Germany: Auf Rosten der Bartholomdichten Handlung, 1761); [Tiphaigne de la Roche], Amilec, ou la graine d’homme (n.p., 1753) (I cite from this edition; all translations are my own); Amilec, or the Seeds of Mankind (London: Needham, 1754). Reviews include L’Abbé Raynal, Correspondence littéraire, philosophique et critique (1753; Paris: Furne, 1829), 1, 78–79; Aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit (Leipzig, Germany: Breitkopf, 1754), 1, 132–40. Amilec is in the vein of Voltaire’s 1752 Micromégas.

19. Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourses in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

20. The spirit-guide whom the protagonist meets materializes like a mirage image, “a sort of stain [tache], a sort of shadow fixed in the air” (1:16). Because humans interpreted them as divinities, the elemental spirits “took measures to no longer be visible: they imagined a kind of filter, a sort of sieve [filière]” that rid them of materiality (1:35–36). For the narrative itself, materialization/dematerialization and visibility/invisibility characterize the primitive nation of Africa.

21. Élie Fréron, “Giphantie,” in L’Année littéraire, vol. 8 (Amsterdam: n.p., 1760), 3–21 (“To obtain durable paintings representing people realistically, one would need only to fix these fugitive images” [9]); “Giphantie,” in L’Avant-coureur, feuille hebdomadaire (Paris: Lambert, 1760), 512–16; Mémoires pour l’histoire des Sciences et des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Chaubert, 1760), 2869–71; Journal des sçavans 55, no. 13 (Amsterdam: Michel Rey, 1760), 501–2; “Giphantia,” Monthly Review, or Literary Journal 24 (London: Griffith, 1761), 222–26; [Tobias Smollett], “Giphantia,” Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 11 (London: Hamilton, 1761), 109–15. For Tobias Smollett’s authorship, see Valerie Wainwright, “Additions to Smollett’s Journalism: Further Attributions for The Critical Review, 1757–1763,” Notes and Queries 59, no. 2 (2012): 226–47.

22. The Lunar Society counted the likes of Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, and Thomas Wedgwood as members, many of whom were published in The Monthly Review. Wedgwood reported on experiments on phlogiston for coloring ceramics and bankrolled fellow members (Robert Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 290–91). The Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters gathered hundreds of key liberal French thinkers and leading scientists in the two decades before the Revolution (Louis Amiable, Une loge maçonnique d’avant 1789: Les Neuf Soeurs [Paris: Germer Baillère, 1897]).

23. Pernille Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750–1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 179.

24. Joseph-Roger de Benoist, Histoire de l’église Catholique au Sénégal: Du milieu du XVè siècle à l’aube du troisième millénaire (Paris/Dakar: Karthala/Claireafrique, 2007), 71–75.

25. Abbé Demanet, Nouvelle histoire de l’Afrique françoise, 2 vols. (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1767), 1:239–66.

26. Andrew S. Curran, “Rethinking Race History: The Role of the Albino in the French Enlightenment Life Sciences,” History and Theory 48 (2009): 117, 242, 249.

27. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 74–76.

28. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 69.

29. Ann Thomson, “Colonialism, Race and Slavery in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes,” Global Intellectual History 2, no. 3 (2017): 251–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2017.1370233. Ann Thomson shows that Raynal first explained racial difference with inherited genetics (“germs”) before adopting Demanet’s environmental chemistry through the intermediary of physiocrat Abbé Pierre-Joseph-André Roubaud. It is not excluded that Immanuel Kant’s telic idea of whiteness owes much to Demanet via Raynal.

30. Jean Senebier, Mémoires physico-chymiques, sur l’influence de la lumière solaire pour modifier les êtres des trois règnes de la NATURE, & sur-tout ceux du règne végétal (Genève, Switzerland: Barthelemy Chirol, 1782), 1:viii.

31. Carole Huta, “Un dialogue entre l’ombre et la lumière. L’art d’observer à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Jean Sénebier (1742–1809),” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 51, no. 1 (1998): 94. See also the special issue on Senebier, Marc J. Ratcliff et al., eds., Archive des sciences 63 (2010); Jean Pierre Maunoir, Éloge historique de Monsieur Sénebier (Paris: Paschoud, 1810), 14–15; Geerdt Magiels, From Sunlight to Insight: Jan IngenHousz, the Discovery of Photosynthesis & Science in the Light of Ecology (Brussels: Brussels University Press, 2010).

32. See Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 22–23, 90–95.

33. Senebier repeats: “White colors blacken. Black colors are invariable/unalterable.” The French original fits colors as well as peoples: “Les blancs noircissent. Les noirs sont invariables”; “Les blancs noircissent. Les noirs sont inaltérables”; “Les blancs ont noircis. Les noirs ont été inaltérables” (3:220, 222, 224).

34. Miriam Claude Meijer, “Petrus Camper on the Origin of Color of Blacks,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 24, no. 2 (1997): 8.

35. Roxann Wheeler glosses complexion as a range of bodily differences related to anatomy, humor theory, climate, culture, etc., arguing it was reduced to skin color only in the 1770s, making race “a science of surfaces” (The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000], 26, 29). See Kary L. Chiles, Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

36. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xv, 44–48.

37. Senebier’s experiments with silver chloride were made in 1778 or 1779. Jean Sénebier, “Réponse à la lettre de Madame de V***,” Observations sur la physique 14, no. 3 (September 1779): 200–215; James Priestley, The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (London: J. Johnson, 1772), 378–80.

38. Jean Senebier, Essai sur l’art d’observer et de faire des expériences (Paris: Fuchs, 1802), 1:6, 110. See Patrick Singy, “The Art of Scientific Observation Before the Emergence of Positivism,” Representations 95, no. 1 (2006): 54–75.

39. Senebier knows Johann Heinrich Lambert’s research on photometry, cosmology, and computing instruments’ margin of deviation (Senebier, Essai, 1:10, 72, 405–9; 2:192, 215–18); he knows William Herschel’s working protocols in mirror-making (3:220–22) and telescope coverage: “Herschel, who knows all the movements he can give to his telescope, uses them to range over [parcourir] the sky scrupulously, by following carefully all of its parts, and by sweeping [balayant] it, as he says, to express the rigor with which he observes it” (1:207).

40. See Antje Pfannkuchen, “Image, Language, Science: Hieroglyphs and the Romantic Quest for Primordial Truth,” in Before Photography, ed. Kirsten Belgum, Vance Byrd, and John D. Benjamin (New York: De Gruyter, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110696448-013.

41. Both Senebier and Lichtenberg corresponded with Joseph Priestley, a key member of the Lunar Society led by the father of Thomas Wedgwood. Linde Katritzky, “Georg Christoph Lichtenberg,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 39, no. 1 (1984): 41–49.

42. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Novi Commentarii Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis. Commentationes physicae et mathematicae classis (Göttingen, Germany: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1778), 8:168–80, translation by Steven Tester.

43. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Nova Methodo Naturam Ac Motum Fluidi Electrici Investigandi (Göttingen, Germany: Johann Christian Dietrich, 1778), pl. 1. See Antje Pfannkuchen, “A Science of Hieroglyphs, or the Test of Bildung,” in The Technological Introject: Friedrich Kittler Between Implementation and the Incalculable, ed. Jeffrey Champlin and Antje Pfannkuchen (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018). A correspondent of William Herschel compared electrophorus images with nebulae in 1785 (Simon Schaffer, “‘The Great Laboratories of the Universe’: William Herschel on Matter Theory and Planetary Life,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 [1980]: 86–87).

44. Antje Pfannkuchen, “A Matter of Visibility—G. Chr. Lichtenberg’s Art and Science of Observation,” Configurations 24, no. 3 (2016): 387.

45. Liselotte Dieckmann, “The Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German Romanticism,” Comparative Literature 7, no. 4 (1955): 306–12; Frances S. Connelly, “Poetic Monsters and Nature Hieroglyphics: The Precocious Primitivism of Philipp Otto Runge,” Art Journal 52, no. 2 (1993): 31–39; Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “How Maya Hieroglyphs Got Their Name: Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western Grammatology Since the Fifteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152, no. 1 (2008): 1–68; J. Michele Molina, “Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata and the Life Story of a Mexican Mystic,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004).

46. Siegfried Zielinski examines these in Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 179.

47. E. F. F. Chladni, Traité d’acoustique (Paris: Courcier, 1809), vii (my translation).

48. Lichtenberg wrote two long essays on William Herschel. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, vols. 6–7 (Göttingen, Germany: Johann Christian Dietrich, 1800–1806).

49. Mark Littman, The Heavens on Fire: The Great Leonid Meteor Storms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 45–52.

50. E. F. F. Chladni, Die Akustik (Leipzig, Germany: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1802).

51. Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Key Texts of Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) on the Science and Art of Nature, trans. Jocelyn Holland (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 305.

52. Lorenz Oken, Isis: Encylopädische Zeitschrift, vorzügl. Für Naturgeschichte, vergleichende Anatomie u. Physiologie (Jena, Germany: Expedition der Isis, 1826), 957. For Müller, see G. E. Berrios, “On the Fantastic Apparitions of Vision by Johannes Müller,” History of Psychiatry 16, no. 2 (2005): 229–46.

53. Georges Vigarello, The Silhouette from the 18th Century to the Present Day, trans. Augusta Dörr (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 16.

54. This “black manner” was inherently racial: William Hogarth connects it to the “network” of “threads” producing color in Black skin. Analysis of Beauty (London: J. Reeves, 1753), 114–15.

55. See Marie-Madeleine Martinet, “Ombres et transparences, de Vinci aux calques numériques: Imitation par analogie ou par contiguïté?,” Sillages Critiques 14 (2012): https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.2788.

56. See Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens (New York: Vintage Books, 2013); Simone Dumont and Monique Gros, “The Important Role of the Two French Astronomers J.-N. Delisle and J.-J. Lalande in the Choice of Observing Places During the Transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769,” Journal of Astronomical Data 19, no. 1 (2013): 131–44.

57. See René Sigrist, “Scientific Networks and Frontiers in the Golden Age of Academies (1700–1830),” in Networking Across Borders and Frontiers, ed. Jürgen Barkhoff and Helmut Eberhart (Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 2009); Jean-Pierre Martin and Anita McConnell, “Joining the Observatories of Paris and Greenwich,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 62 (2008): 355–72.

58. See Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Tony Ballantyne, ed., Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific (London: Routledge, 2018).

59. Camille Blachère, “Discours scientifique et récit de voyage: Les observations des passages de Vénus en 1761 et 1769 et les modalités de la communication des données astronomiques acquises lors d’expéditions extra-européennes,” paper presented at Narrative Matters 2014: Narrative Knowing/Récit et Savoir Conference, June 2014, Paris, France, available at HAL Open Science, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01099094, accessed June 10, 2025.

60. M. Le Gentil, Voyage dans les mers de l’Inde fait par ordre du roi, à l’occasion du passage de Vénus sur le disque solaire, le 6 juin 1761, & le 3 du même mois 1769 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1779), 1:39–40.

61. Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Wulf, Chasing Venus, 93. See B. E. Schaefer, “The Transit of Venus and the Notorious Black Drop Effect,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 32, no. 4 (109) (2001): 325–36. It was called “a black ligament” and “black fibers” by Samuel Dunn (“A Determination of the Exact Moments of Time When the Planet Venus Was at External and Internal Contact with the Sun’s Limb,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 60 [1770]: 65–73). M. de la Lande calls it “obscure extension [prolongement obscur]” and “black ligament [ligament noir]” (“Explication du prolongement obscur du disque de Vénus,” Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des sciences [January 31, 1770]: 406–12). The earliest mention of black drop was by Anders Johan Lexell in 1769 as gutta nigra in Latin (Johan Sten, A Comet of the Enlightenment: Anders Johan Lexell’s Life and Discoveries [Espoo, Finland: Birkhäuser, 2014], 71fn12). The “gutta nigra” originally named an opium concoction and thus has Orientalist connotations (Thomas Castle, Lexicon Pharmaceuticum [London: Cox and Sons, 1828], 337). For the connection between Venus, the black-drop effect, a hypothetical Venus atmosphere, and possible features showing life, see David Dunér, “Venusians: The Planet Venus in the 18th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate,” Journal of Astronomical Data 19, no. 1 (2013): 145–67.

62. The eclipsed Moon was known as “luna niger,” while a basic operation in alchemy (with Egypt as its purported source) was attaining blackness (calcinatio) to regain a purer whiteness (see Stanton J. Linden, ed., The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]). On Carl Jung’s racialized construct of the “nigredo” stage, see Graham Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History (Hove, England: Psychology Press, 2012).

63. Don Sanchez Cetquero was the first to use the English expression in “Observation of the Transit of Mercury of May 4, 1832,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2 (1833): 140. The one-drop rule came into effect in the U.S. South in the 1830s before being codified in Thurman v. State, 18. Ala. 276 (1850) (Frank Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule [Palm Coast, FL: Backintyme, 2005], 175–76).

64. Others followed under names such as Eidograph, Prosopographus, Delineator, etc. Vigarello, Sihouette, 23.

65. Henry Vivarez, “Un Précurseur de la photographie dans l’art du portrait à bon marché,” Le Vieux Papier: Bulletin de la Société Archéologique, Historique & Artistique 4 (Lille, France: Lefebvre-Ducrocq, 1906), 181–88, 289–96, 358–69, 453–57.

66. See Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “‘Interesting Characters by the Lines of Their Faces’: Moses Williams’s Profile Portrait Silhouettes of Native Americans,” in Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now, ed. Asma Naeem (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, 2018).

67. John B. Lyon, “‘The Science of Sciences’: Replication and Reproduction in Lavater’s Physiognomics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (2007): 258.

68. Johann Kaspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung des Menschenliebe, 4 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1775–1778), 2:90, quoted in Lyon, “Science of Sciences,” 262.

69. Laurence Chatel de Brancion, Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008).

70. Barbara Maria Stafford, “‘Peculiar Marks’: Lavater and the Countenance of Blemished Thought,” Art Journal 46, no. 3 (1987): 185–92.

71. Quoted in David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 102. David Bindman provides an excellent treatment of Lavater’s overall views on race at 92–123.

72. Victor I. Stoichita, “Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy and the Hermeneutics of Shadow,” Res 31 (1997): 134.

73. Asma Naeem, “Black Out,” in Black Out, 21.

74. The earliest depiction of an individual enslaved African American is a 1796 cutout silhouette of the head of a woman named Flora. Naeem, “Black Out,” 92–93, 97, 103.

75. François Arago, Rapport de M. Arago sur le daguerréotype (Paris: Bachelier, 1839), 13.

76. Arago and Charles sat together on numerous review commissions at the Académie des Sciences from the 1810s to the 1820s, and there is no reason to believe that Arago was misinformed.

77. Gaston Tissandier, Les Merveilles de la photographie (Paris: Hachette, 1874), 13fn1.

78. R. B. Litchfield, “The Story of Professor Charles’s Silhouettes,” in Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer (London: Duckworth, 1903).

79. “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, D90300, 1781, 2, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris.

80. “Décret à l’offre faite par M. Charles,” in Collection Générale des décrets rendus par l’Assemblée nationale (Paris: Baudouin, 1792), 77. In 1806, he chose 243 instruments to be preserved at the Institut de France, some of which found their way to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (J.-A.-C. Charles, “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104 XX, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Paris).

81. Frédéric Jean Laurent Meyer [Friedrich Johann Lorenz Meyer], “Le Cabinet de Charles,” in Fragments sur Paris, trans. Général Dumouriez, vol. 2 (Hamburg, Germany: n.p., 1798), 2:139–43. A longer description of Charles’s camera obscura is found in Mémoires de Madame la duchesse d’Abrantès, 2nd ed. (Paris: Mame, 1835), 4:319–21. Charles writes pithily: “At the bottom of my camera obscura I made a hole to look at people walking in the Louvre, then I look at their specter [sur leur spectre] and they are six times larger” (“Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, MSS-NS 2104 tCIV pièce 3, 1784, 196, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris).

82. L. Babonneix, “Julie Bouchaud des Hérettes à la ‘Maison Coigny’ (juin 1796-octobre 1800),” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 30, no. 4 (1923): 466–89. Her grandfather brought an enslaved man named François Jan to Nantes (Dominique Le Page, review of “Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne,” Annales de Bretagne 121, no. 2 [2014]: 166).

83. Joseph Fourier, “Eloge historique de M. Charles,” Mémoire de l’académie royale des sciences 8 (1829): lxxiii–lxxxviii; Claude Joseph Blondel, Un Enfant illustre de Beaugency: Le physicien et aéronaute Jacques Charles (1746–1823) (Orléans, France: Académie d’Orléans, 2003), with uneven scholarship.

84. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter, England: Exeter University Press, 2000).

85. Charles, “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, MSS-NS 2104 tCIV pièce 17, 1784, 185–88, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris.

86. Charles, “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, MSS-NS 2104 tCIV pièce 17, 1784, 120–21; Hachette, “De l’héliostate,” Journal de l’école polytechnique 9 (1813): 263–79. See Allan Mills, “Portable Heliostats (Solar Illuminators),” Annals of Science 43, no. 4 (1986): 386. Charles’s heliostat was constructed and sold by the optician Dumotiez according to Monge, Cassini, and Bertholon, eds., Dictionnaire de physique (Paris: Hôtel de Thou, 1816), under “heliostat,” 3:454.

87. Charles, “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, MSS-NS 2104 tCIV pièce 17, 1784, 130–31. Mannoni misinterpreted this “artificial candle” as a paraffin lamp.

88. Henri de Parville, “Gaston Tissandier,” La Nature 1372 (September 9, 1899): 226.

89. Étienne Malus, “De l’héliostate de Sgravesande perfectionné par M. Charles,” in Mémoires de mathématiques et de physique (Paris: Baudouin, 1811), 279.

90. “Charles’ mégascope” was placed in the “shutter of a dark room,” confirming it was integrally attached to a solar microscope. Charles Chossat, “Sur la Courbure des milieux réfringents de l’oeil chez le boeuf,” Annales de physique et de chimie 10 (1819): 339.

91. After doing my own archival research on Charles, I discovered the concurring work of Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

92. “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, MSS-NS 2104 tCIV pièce 3, 1784, folio 20, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris.

93. “In general a camera obscura is not very good for drawing, but it is excellent for taking down a topographical position.” “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, MSS-NS 2104 tCIV pièce 3, 1784, 227, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris.

94. “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, MSS-NS 2104 tCIV pièce 17, 1784, 231, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris.

95. “Cours de physique de Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles,” Ms 2104, MSS-NS 2104 tCIV pièce 17, 1784, 231, 234, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris.

96. A manual of home entertainment explains “the Art of making silhouette portraits in the English manner using a camera obscura [chambre obscure]” (Decremps, Codicile de Jérôme Sharp [Paris: Desoer, 1791], 56–57). According to Henry Vivarez, the Encyclopédie méthodique of Panckoucke indicates under “physionotrace”: “We may consider as physionotrace the shadow of a figure’s profile. The optical instrument known as the megascope, with which may be obtained in a camera obscura the exact tracings of all reliefs, is a true physionotrace” (I am unable to locate this entry, but it is cited in Vivarez, “Un Précurseur de la photographie,” 290–91).