The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World by Neal Stephenson

serves to confirm what I have said above of the real Encrease of those Colonies, and of the flourishing Condition of the Commerce carried on there.
    —D ANIEL D EFOE , A Plan of the English Commerce
    S OMETIMES IT SEEMS AS IF everyone’s immigrating to America—sailing-ships on the North Atlantic as thick as watermen’s boats on the Thames, more or less wearing ruts in the sea-lanes—and so, in an idle way, Enoch supposes that his appearance on the threshold of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts will come as no surprise at all to its founder. But Daniel Waterhousenearly swallows his teeth when Enoch walks through the door, and it’s not just because the hem of Enoch’s cloak knocks over a great teetering stack of cards. For a moment Enoch’s afraid that some sort of apoplectic climax is in progress, and that Dr. Waterhouse’s final contribution to the Royal Society, after nearly a lifetime of service, will be a traumatically deranged cardiac muscle, pickled in spirits of wine in a crystal jug. The Doctor spends the first minute of their interview frozen halfway between sitting and standing, with his mouth open and his left hand on his breastbone. This might be the beginnings of a courteous bow, or a hasty maneuver to conceal, beneath his coat, a shirt so work-stained as to cast aspersions on his young wife’s diligence. Or perhaps it’s a philosophick enquiry, viz. checking his own pulse—if so, it’s good news, because Sir John Floyer just invented the practice, and if Daniel Waterhouse knows of it, it means he’s been keeping up with the latest work out of London.
    Enoch takes advantage of the lull to make other observations and try to judge empirically whether Daniel’s as unsound as the faculty of Harvard College would have him believe. From the Doctors’ jibes on the ferry-ride, Enoch had expected nothing but cranks and gears. And indeed Waterhouse does have a mechanic’s shop in a corner of the—how will Enoch characterize this structure to the Royal Society? “Log cabin,” while technically correct, calls to mind wild men in skins. “Sturdy, serviceable, and in no way extravagant laboratory making ingenious use of indigenous building materials.” There. But anyway, most of it is given over not to the hard ware of gears, but to softer matters: cards. They are stacked in slender columns that would totter in the breeze from a moth’s wings if the columns had not been jammed together into banks, stairways, and terraces, the whole formation built on a layer of loose tiles on the dirt floor to (Enoch guesses) prevent the card-stacks from wicking up the copious ground-water. Edging farther into the room and peering round a bulwark of card-stacks, Enoch finds a writing-desk stocked with blank cards. Ragged gray quills project from inkpots, bent and broken ones crosshatch the floor, bits of down and fluff and cartilage and other bird-wreckage form a dandruffy layer on everything.
    On pretext of cleaning up his mess, Enoch begins to pick the spilled cards off the floor. Each is marked at the top with a rather large number, always odd, and beneath it a long row of ones and zeroes, which (since the last digit is always 1, indicating an odd number) he takes to be nothing other then the selfsame number expressed in the binary notation lately perfected by Leibniz.Underneath the number, then, is a word or short phrase, a different one on each card. As he picks them up and re-stacks them he sees: Noah’s Ark; Treaties terminating wars; Membranophones (e.g., mir-litons); The notion of a classless society; The pharynx and its outgrowths; Drawing instruments (e.g., T-squares); The Skepticism of Pyrrhon of Elis; Requirements for valid maritime insurance contracts; The Kamakura bakufu; The fallacy of Assertion without Knowledge; Agates; Rules governing the determination of questions of fact in Roman civil courts; Mummification; Sunspots; The sex organs of bryophytes (e.g., liverwort);