2 - The Little: Early Writings

Summary

No one seems to have written a history of the little, or, for that matter, of the large. Given the authority and charisma associated with great size, the latter optic might seem the more obvious of the two. Vico's version of history is a case in point. According to The New Science (Book 2, Chapter 3), gentile humanity was founded by people who renounced the true religion of Noah and then, because of their hard life in the forests that sprang up after the Flood, grew to be giants. The Hebrews meanwhile retained a normal human size, to which the giants returned. Largeness remains a convenient way of figuring the paradigmatic and the powerful. The little has a history in its own right, however, and one of particular interest since at least as early as the Renaissance.

A LITTLE HISTORY

In the story of scale, the invention of the compound microscope in 1590 and the telescope in 1605 are important landmarks.

One invention increased the scope of the macrocosm; the other revealed the microcosm: between them, the naive conceptions of space that the ordinary man carried around were completely upset: one might say that these two inventions, in terms of the new perspective, extended the vanishing point toward infinity and increased almost infinitely the plane of the foreground from which those lines had their point of origin.