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'How could one come to know the motions of wit? Here Cavendish left off her quarrel with Hobbes and turned to the “Modern Microscopical or Dioptrical Writers”—Descartes, Hooke, Boyle—whose splendid and costly instruments, she insisted, had deceived them as to the true nature of motion. In her 1666 treatise, “Observations upon Experimental Philosophy,” she complained that the lenses of microscopes were fractured, flawed, and unevenly shaped, and that their mirrors produced distorted figures, like “a high heel to a short legg.” Lice appeared as large as lobsters, while the wings of birds were abnormally stretched, their feathers streaked with garish colors. “How shall a feather inform us of the interior nature of a Bird?” she wondered.'
