Now, ten years later, Balthasar von Ulm had gone on, he had returned with a new and even more stupendous invention, one with which, if His Majesty and His Lords and Ladies would lend him their eyes, he would refute another alleged law, a law that since antiquity has been held even more sacrosanct by those bookish thinkers who presume to hand down natural law without ever looking up from their texts to cast a single glance at the outside world: namely, the scholastic doctrine of horror vacui, the law prohibiting the possibility of the void. “Yes,” cried von Ulm, “the void exists, it exists, you shall see it yourselves!” With that he yanked off the white sheet to reveal a peculiar apparatus consisting of a glass globe about the size of an adult human head mounted on a wooden frame and into the bottom of which was inserted a brass tube that ran toward the floor, where it tapered and terminated beside a sort of foot treadle such as one might find on a loom or lathe. “With this machine,” von Ulm said, pulling over a stool and pedaling the treadle, “I shall evacuate the globe of everything inside it, producing the very vacuum that no less an authority than Aristotle assures us cannot be found in any corner of the cosmos. Yet we shall find it right here, in the Great Hall!” Margaretha scoffed, the Emperor leaned forward on his throne, and Herr von Ulm treadled away, thereby opening and closing a certain valve, and drawing a piston up and down the length of the tube, so the Prince explained to the astronomer and the astronomer in turn enlightened Leibniz, who noted parenthetically to the Philosophical Transactions that if it indeed existed, which he had doubts that it did, then that machine would appear to be an early “but of course quite crude” antecedent of the “very exquisite pneumatical engine” devised in recent times by the “Honorable Mr. Boyle, expert explorer of nature, who in this very journal” (to which Robert Boyle was already a prolific contributor, which made doubly delicate this suggestion by young Leibniz that he had found a possible forerunner to Boyle’s famous invention and thus cast into doubt the latter’s priority over it) “has brought such admirable clarity to the concept of coldness, and has related the interesting account of the monstrous calf discovered of late in its mother’s womb, whose hind legs lacked joints, and whose tongue was split into three parts…” For some time the Great Hall was silent apart from the rocking back and forth of the foot treadle, the shuttling up and down of the piston, the periodic bulletins (“A quarter empty! Halfempty!”) Herr von Ulm broadcast with monumental fanfare, and the scoffing sounds Margaretha produced at intervals deep in her throat, which, “although Wilhelmina and I were completely inured to them, still had the capacity to perturb Father, not to mention Katharina,” said Heinrich, and after each of which the Court Chamberlain whispered something into His Majesty’s ear.