Description
qua, experientiis, & rationibus physicis, vacuum in natura non dari, probatur. Vilnius: Typis. Acad. Societatis Iesu, 1648. 12mo., with 11 engraved plates of experimental apparatus, contemporary vellum, paper generally a little discoloured throughout, fore-edge of title page and first couple of leaves frayed, inner joints cracking, lacking the preliminary leaf *6 (possibly a blank), with the book plate of John Bury
Footnote
Note: We have been unable to trace this book in the Lithuanian National Bibliography, the Polish National Library, the University of Vilnius Library, the Jagiellonian University Library, the Bibliografia Esteichera or the USTC. The only reference we have been able to trace to is in the Bibliotheca Stoschiana sive Catalogus selectissimorum librorum quos collegerat Philippus Liber Baro de Stosch, Florence, 1759, where it appears as item no 2052. Information about the author appears equally elusive. He is described on the title page as an alumnus of the Jesuit Academy of Vilnius, a Master of Arts and Philosophy, and of Theology. He may be the same Georgius Blumnau, doctor in theology and pastor at Mehlsack (fl. 1649-71) in Zeitschrift für die Geschichte und Altertumskunde Ermlands, vol. 15, p.422, but there is no reference to any of his writings. (We are grateful to Dr Sara Trevisan for kindly identifying this.)
Interest in whether Nature truly abhorred a vacuum had been growing in the 17th century following experiments performed in 1640 by Gasparo Berti and by Evangelista Torricelli, a professor in Florence in 1644. Torricelli's experiment, using tubes filed with mercury and immersed in a mercury reservoir, was the first successful attempt to produce a vacuum and subsequently convinced the scientific community. Berti's earlier attempt using water was less successful.
Pascal repeated the experiment and, in addition, tried other types of liquid. He found that the maximum height was exactly inversely proportional to the used liquid's density.
Despite these experiments the discussion between those who maintained no vacuum is possible (plenists) and those who believed that a vacuum was possible (vacuists) continued until Otto von Guericke of Magdeburg's famous demonstration of 1657 using two hemispheres with a diameter of 40 cm, known as the Magdeburg hemispheres which two teams of eight horses on either side were just barely able to separate after the enclosed volume had been evacuated. (K. Jousten, The history of vacuum science and vacuum technology, pp. 2-6).
Blumnau's volume describes various experiments and provides illustrations of the apparatus employed, by which, as he puts it "most learned men in Italy France had dared to doubt." His work, such as two others published by the Jesuit Academy at Vilnius, Albert Wijuk Kojalowicz's Oculus ratione correctus, sux refutatio demonstrations ocularis de Vacuo and Oswald Krüger's Dissertatio de vacuo, both also published in 1648, were in response to the first publication of Torricelli's mercury experiment by the Polish Capuchin Friar Valeriano Magni in 1647 and which he claimed as his own. The Jesuit responses to the vacuum experiment were without exception attacks ad hominem on Magni and the Jesuits' role in the void debate was preoccupied by the Torricellian experiment. Magni's interpretation of the experiment was radically anti-Aristotelian. For an account of the confrontation between Aristotelianism which the Jesuits were obliged to teach and the new sciences emerging in the 17th century see M.J. Gorman, "Jesuit explorations of the Torricellian space : carp-bladders and sulphurous fumes" in Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, tome 106, n°1. 1994, pp. 7-32.