* flipping through the pages I stopped with some interest on section for the "Optical Department" (page 84)
* I noticed the pince-nez glasses, and wondered "does pince-nez just mean 'pinch nose'?
* looked up pince-nez on Wikipedia[1], sure enough, pince-nez means "pinch nose".
* there is an interesting section in this article about early glasses [2]
* A citation in this section leads to "Renaissance vision from spectacles to telescopes," (p. 167) helpfully archived on the Internet Archive [3]
* paging through this book leads to a "fairly complete description of horn frame making in a Florentine carnival song of the early sixteenth century." [4] (p.171)
And finally, this "Florentine carnival song" has the following verse:
> Because they are made by
> necromantic artifice and the planets
> of Mercury, Jupiter and Mars,
> herbal juices and very secret,
> they make men wise
> when they use these spectacles.
I had no idea of the necromantic powers I was invoking by wearing glasses!
[2]:
> The earliest form of eyewear for which any archaeological record exists comes from the middle of the 15th century. It is a primitive pince-nez...
* flipping through the pages I stopped with some interest on section for the "Optical Department" (page 84)
* I noticed the pince-nez glasses, and wondered "does pince-nez just mean 'pinch nose'?
* looked up pince-nez on Wikipedia[1], sure enough, pince-nez means "pinch nose".
* there is an interesting section in this article about early glasses [2]
* A citation in this section leads to "Renaissance vision from spectacles to telescopes," (p. 167) helpfully archived on the Internet Archive [3]
* paging through this book leads to a "fairly complete description of horn frame making in a Florentine carnival song of the early sixteenth century." [4] (p.171)
And finally, this "Florentine carnival song" has the following verse:
> Because they are made by
> necromantic artifice and the planets > of Mercury, Jupiter and Mars,
> herbal juices and very secret,
> they make men wise
> when they use these spectacles.
I had no idea of the necromantic powers I was invoking by wearing glasses!
Thanks for the fun diversion!
---
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pince-nez
[2]: > The earliest form of eyewear for which any archaeological record exists comes from the middle of the 15th century. It is a primitive pince-nez...
[3]: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_peIL7hVQUmwC/page/n167/mo...
[4]: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_peIL7hVQUmwC/page/n171/mo...