Prof John Ferguson, 1895:
"Even a writer of historical fiction who wishes his story to have the verisimilitude of the time he portrays, would do well to study in these and like books the beliefs or the notions about natural phenomena, or the credulities of the people he may have to bring upon his stage, for he could not invent them.
"It would be as difficult to imagine the natural science of a past age, as it is to know the science of the present without devoted study. I do not think that any one now could write a book like Fenton’s, or Johnson’s, or the Kiranides, if he were to try."
*I think the late Dr Ferguson is quite right to make this observation. I just read his entire book from 1895, with steadily increasing interest, and whenever he mentioned some ultra-rare, specialized tome, I was commonly able to find it on archive.org. And, yeah, these antique books of technical tips and tricks are so different from contemporary science and tech that it's impossible to back-project the frame of mind that created them. There are entire lost paradigms in there; for instance, the idea that a cream that removes rust from iron should also remove blemishes from a face, or that blood can be purified into an "oil of blood" and then used as lantern fuel.
*They're also books which are just chock-full, choking, even, with wunderkammer marvels. I never realized that there was so much popular (or unpopular) proto-science-fiction surrounding proto-science. I'm quite the devotee of oddities of techno-history, but this book has truly been an education for me. It's just got vast compost heaps of peculiar material, previously unknown to me. I probably would have researched, composed and written books like this myself, if I had ever lived in those eras.
https://archive.org/details/bibliographical00ferggoog/page/n9/mode/2up
