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This essay offers a new reading of Galileo's most celebrated anagram, incorporating both the prehistory of his late-1610 disclosure concerning the moon-like phases of Venus, and the awkward "leftover letters," o and y , of the eventual cypher. It argues for a sustained analogy between components of the optical instrument, musical instruments, and particular anatomical structures described by Galen and elaborated by early modern anatomists in Padua. It proposes, finally, the cypher as a calculated response to the Neapolitan magus and playwright Giambattista della Porta's challenge to Galileo's claims about the telescope itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter N. Miller, Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. xv + 18 b/w pls. + 256 pp., 20 illus. [...]

This essay examines Galileo's peculiar comparison of small lunar craters in 1610 in his first treatise of telescopic observations, the Sidereus Nuncius, to the eyes in a peacock's feathers and to a particular sort of glassware, and it argues that these allusions reveal more about a certain kind of sound than about the visual appearance of the moon. Galileo's odd analogies find subsequent development in a thought experiment relating sight, sound, and sensation in his Two New Sciences of 1638. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pamela H. Smith. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 323 pp. + 28 color pls. [...]