MDDM Ch. 14 Loose Ends

[jbor]

on 12/11/01 7:13 PM, jbor at jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> 3. What is the reference to "Quebec" as a "Zero-Point of History" at 152.23?
> 
The Fall of Quebec in 1759?

http://www.digitalhistory.org/quebec59.html

> 
> 8. "Dixon's connection with Christopher Le Maire", Jesuit Priest (156.34) ?

Christopher Maire was an English Jesuit. He apparently contributed a large
scale map of Durham in 1711:

http://www.antiquemaps.co.uk/book/chapter15.html

For a time during the 1750s it seems that the team of Fra Boscovich and
Christopher Maire were a mirror-image Roman Catholic version of Chas & Jere:

    Boscovich [...] was the advisor of the papal Government in all important
    technical questions. Thus, when in the middle of the eighteenth century
    the great dome of St. Peter's began to show cracks and other signs of
    damage, causing consternation to the pope and to the Eternal City,
    Boscovich was consulted, and the excitement was not allayed until his
    plan to place large iron bands about the dome was carried out. His
    advice was sought when there was a question of rendering innocuous the
    Pontine marshes and he was also entrusted with the survey of the Papal
    States. Pope Benedict XIV commissioned him and his fellow Jesuit, Le
    Maire, to carry out several precise meridian arc measurements, and it
    seems to have been due chiefly to his influence that the same pope, in
    1757, abrogated the obsolete decree of the Index against the Copernican
    system.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02691a.htm

Thus, it seems that the "connection" with Dixon is operating on two levels:

    R. J. Boscovich and C. Maire
    De Litteraria Expeditione per Pontificiam Ditionem . . .
    (Typographio Palladis, Rome, 1755), pp. 94-96.

    * ROGER BOSCOVICH sees some EARLY INFERIOR MIRAGEs, and looming
    * The mirage observations are in paragraphs 173 and 174.
    * These seem to be the first circumstantial descriptions of mirages.
    *    To understand para.173, some explanation is required:
    * They were starting the triangulation at the mouth of the Ausa river
    * (near Rimini) in July, 1752, using a baseline measured along the shore
    * some months previously. The "sign" used at each end of the baseline
    * was three posts stuck in the ground, with a whitewashed sheet wrapped
    * around their upper ends as a target to sight on. The angles were
    * measured with a portable quadrant. Now read on:
    * "As soon as the signs were erected, we went there to take angles, and
    * at least at the Ausa's mouth everything went quite well. But as soon
    as 
    * we reached the other end, a quite wonderful phenomenon appeared to us.
    [...]

That this Jesuit Christopher Maire doesn't seem to have had any connection
with the "fam'd" Dutch explorers is not surprising, the Dutch East India
Company authorities at the Cape, having succumbed to paranoia and
xenophobia, merely "assume, without Reflection", that a relationship exists,
and get the Englishman's name wrong in the process:

> The "Dutch Le Maires, ... Jacob ... and Isaac ... " (157) ?

http://www.mercatormag.com/304_son.html

http://pacific.vita.org/pacific/dutch/maire.htm

http://www.hordern.com/publications/ams5lemaire.htm

best