Jane Squire, A Proposal to Determine Our Latitude. London: Printed for the author, and sold by S. Cope, at the Bible, in King-Street near Golden-Square; and by the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1743.
Linda Hall Library Cage QB231.S68 1743 octavo

Let me confess something to you, reader: this is one of the most enchanting things I acquired for the Library in 2019. It’s not the most flashy of acquisitions, nor is it the most expensive - but I love it in that it is a reminder to me to not judge science of the past through current knowledge. That, and I love the fold out plate, the binding, and the story behind Jane Squire and her creation of proposals to determine longitude at sea under the 1714 Longitude Act.

Squire was one of two women who submitted a proposal under that 1714 act to determine longitude - the other was Elizabeth Johnson. Squire proposed dividing the sky into 1440 “Cloves of Longitude,” which were bisected by 720 parallel “Rings of Latitude.” These created over one million segments of the sky, which Squire referred to as “cards,” each centered on a constellation with a zenith point. She expounds on her proposal in the included fold out plate.

Squire was the daughter of Priscilla and Robert Squire, a wealthy and well connected couple. She was christened in 1686, and engaged in several high-risk investment schemes, unusual for a woman of her time. She was also Roman Catholic at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment was high in Britain. Her investments failed, and led to her imprisonment in the Fleet Prison for debts for three years, beginning in 1726. After her release, she began work on her proposal and a larger method for understanding the “celestial and terrestrial spheres.” It was not unusual for a British woman of Squire’s class to learn basic astronomy, but the work to determine longitude at sea was seen as “men’s work.”

After the opening plate, she reproduces the text of the proposal itself as well as germane correspondence related to her proposal.

She submitted her proposal in 1731, and heard nothing from the board of reviewers. Thanks to her social connections she exchanged letters with several prominent people involved with the longitude competition, but had great difficulty in getting updates or feedback on her proposal. Beyond these contacts, she also sent a copy of her proposal to Hans Sloane, Abraham de Moivre, and the Pope.

Her proposal combined elements of religion and theology, which was not uncommon in Georgian science, and was not a point of exclusion for other proposals. She also created a new universal language which used symbols to enhance use and understanding of her proposal.

Squire correctly perceived that her gender hindered any legitimate response to her proposal. Beyond this limitation, many entrants in the longitude competition received no response or feedback on their proposals. Indeed, in her correspondence with Thomas Hamner reprinted in the book, she states “I do not remember any Play-thing, that does not appear to me a mathematical Instrument; nor any mathematical Instrument, that does not appear to me a Play-thing: I see not, therefore, why I should confine myself to Needles, Cards, and Dice.”

Perhaps to gain notice in the public eye, Squire made plans to publish her proposal, germane correspondence, and her essay on the universal language. This book was published in three editions - in English and French in 1742, then solely in English in 1743. For the 1743 printing, she commissioned the binding and printing: the plate would have been expensive thanks to its size, and the binding with an inset device with symbols from her universal language would have been quite costly.

Squire died insolvent in 1743, and in her will left large bequests to friends and family based on the income she anticipated from the success of her proposal. She clearly had great faith in her proposal, and though it was dismissed out of hand by the Commissioners for the competition, and later mocked, it is an earnest effort in keeping with science and natural philosophy of its time.

An especial thank-you to Alexi Baker for her work on Jane Squire, which illuminated this book for me, and made this essay possible. Also, thank you to Cambridge University Library for scanning their copy of Squire’s work.

Rembrandt Peale, An Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth, or, Great American Incognitum, an Extinct, Immense, Carnivorous Animal, Whose Fossil Remains Have Been Found in North America. London, Printed for E. Lawrence, by C. Mercier, 1803.
Linda Hall Library RBR QE882.U7 P3 1803 octavo

Do you ever have those moments where things in your career seem to align for a moment or two? Moments like those take things from your past, partially remembered, and bring them to life. Well, I had one of those when I pulled this item in preparation for one of our monthly exhibits in the rare book room at the library.

The present pamphlet, by Rembrandt Peale, describes the efforts of Rembrandt’s father, Charles Willson Peale, to excavate the bones of a mastodon - the first such skeleton excavated in the United States. Early in my career as a librarian, I was fascinated by Charles Willson Peale, and this came flooding back to me when I held the Library’s copy of this item.

Peale worked in a wide array of fields in his lifetime: soldier, artist, scientist, inventor, politician, and naturalist. He began his working life as a saddle maker and being dissatisfied with this work, found he had a talent for paintings, and so set his mind to being a painter. In his work to improve his raw talent he studied with the famous British colonial painter John Singleton Copley.

He began painting portraits of the leaders of the American revolution, and served the United States as a soldier in the revolutionary war, rising to the rank of Captain. His portraits brought him a level of financial security after the war, allowing him to not rely exclusively on new painted works for a source of income. He also founded the first museum in the United States in Philadelphia, where he settled seeking commissions for portraits. He intended the museum to hold both art and artifacts, “to instruct the mind and sow the seeds of Virtue” in the young United States. His museum existed in several locations in Philadelphia for nearly fifty years. In 1822, he created this self-portrait of himself in his museum, at its zenith in the second floor of Independence Hall.

Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Founding his museum, and the prominence he had in the early United States, enabled Peale to engage in negotiations with John Marsten, the owner of the farm where the mastodon skeleton was eventually excavated. In the summer of 1801, he returned to Marsten’s farm and to the already-dug pit, filled with 12 feet of water which fell to Peale and his workers to remove. Peale created a method of removing the water in collaboration with a local millwright, adding a flavor of engineering to this scientific and artistic endeavor. A chain of buckets, powered by several people walking in a wheel, served to remove water from the pit. Peale estimated that this removed 1,440 gallons of water an hour, and led to a pit without standing water. A large crowd of onlookers arrived to observe the working of this device, as well as the work of excavation of this now famous mastodon skeleton. However, the pit began to collapse, leading to the early termination of this excavation, depicted by Peale here:

Charles Willson Peale, Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1808
Baltimore City Life Museum Collection

Note the lift to lower water levels in the excavation pit, which seems to be the visual crux of the painting. That said, Peale placed himself in the painting - on the right hand side, illuminated, in a dark jacket. The people to his left are his family, including his sons (all named after artists): Rembrandt, Rubens, and Raphaelle, the subjects of one of my favorite works of American Art:

Charles Willson Peale, Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I), 1795
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Despite the failure of this dig, Peale excavated a complete skeleton that same year at a different site. He later recovered a second skeleton, which toured Europe, prompting the pamphlet held in the Library’s collections. In 1786, Peale opened the first museum in the United States in Philadelphia, the existence of which placed him to be in charge of the mastodon excavation, which details the excavation and mounting of the skeletons. Rembrandt Peale also engaged in a more serious scientific description of the bones, but also asserted that the animal was carnivorous, reorienting the tusks to support his claim.

Peale’s museum closed in 1849, with the mastodon now in Germany. You can still see a glimpse of it in Peale’s portrait of himself in his museum above, with a leg bone and jaw.

Charlotte, Lady Brooke Pechell
Demonstrations
Great Britain, before 1841?

This manuscript, created by Charlotte, Lady Brooke Pechell (1759-1841) was among the first acquisitions I made for the collection focused on women in science. This is her manuscript made while studying elements of astronomy and geometry, and is bound in gilt calf.

John Hoppner, Mrs. Thomas Pechell (Charlotte Clavering, died 1841),1799
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Charlotte is known to us mostly through the lens of the men in her life. She was born Charlotte Clavering. Pechell was the younger daughter of Lieutenant General Sir James John Clavering, commander in chief in India, and his wife, born Lady Diana West. Charlotte married Thomas Pechell in 1783 and they had two sons and a daughter. Pechell was the son of Lieutenant Colonel Sir Paul Pechell, first Baronet. Thomas succeeded his father in 1800, and assumed the additional surname of Brooke the following year, in compliance with his mother’s will. At her death in 1841, Lady Pechell bequeathed this manuscript to her nephew, The Reverend Henry Alfred Napier.

Charlotte raised three children: Frances Katherine, George Richard, and Samuel John. Both of her sons served with distinction in the Royal Navy, and Samuel John was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, as well as the Royal Astronomical Society. We have yet to determine if his membership was due to his wealth and position or his work in science. However, I find it remarkable that his mother - Charlotte - created this manuscript that taught many of the precepts both George Richard and Samuel John would have needed to know to pass their exams for promotion to Lieutenant.

In our work on this manuscript, we discovered that it was created not just as an aide-mémoire for Charlotte, but instead was a copy of a known deck of cards: The Elements of Astronomy and Geography: Explained on 40 Cards, Beautifully Engraved and Coloured by the Abbe Paris. The copying is precise, but not slavish to the original, especially in the text. What follows are comparisons of the cards and the manuscript, both of which are fully digitized and online.

Almost as remarkable as this pairing is the story of its acquisition by the Library. The manuscript came to us from The Second Shelf, a bookstore in London that focuses on rare and antiquarian books, modern first editions, ephemera, manuscripts, and rediscovered works by women. We were delighted to add it to our collection, and suspected that we never would be able to acquire a set of the cards Charlotte used to make her manuscript. However, two months later a set became available through Honey & Wax Booksellers of New York. It seemed very meet and right that both items came from woman-owned bookstores.

Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium, Basel, 1566.
RBR QB41.C64 1566 octavo

This is our copy of the second edition of Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, 1566. While we do have a first, from 1543, I personally prefer our second edition. I love the 20th century pigskin binding, the MS title on the fore edge, and the annotations! These annotations include corrections to the text, and systematic specific cross references to Ptolemy. Longer notes concern Tycho Brahe’s value for the latitude of Frueberg. The longest note, on the size of Mercury’s epicycle, is on a small slip attached to the page. 

As pictured above, our copy bears the censorship marks based on instructions from the Index librorum prohibitorum, as noted by Karl Galle, former LHL fellow. The second edition of this text (the one we’re discussing) typically includes a reprinting of Rheticus’ Narratio Prima, which is absent from our copy. This was required of those who followed the guideline, as Rheticus was banned. As Achilles Gasser’s introduction to Narratio Prima was also banned (and integral to the work here), the owner simply scratched out Gasser’s words.

I love the signs of engagement in the book, and the way it speaks about a wider world of ideas.

That said, our 1543 De revolutionibus has a remarkable item in it: this instrument that helped a past reader understand a Tusi couple: