Homunculus Cabinet
Books that were never
put into English
A small press for first translations of early modern scientific works: set against the original printings, annotated, and made readable by anyone who wants to read them.
In preparation — 2026
Essay on Dioptrics
Nicolaas Hartsoeker · Paris, 1694 · translated from the French, in English for the first time
Translated with commentary by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic
Edited by Dominic Ouryan Grayson
In 1694 a Dutch lens-grinder living in Paris published a book explaining how light bends, how the eye sees, what the moon is made of, and what he had found swimming in a drop of seed. It has never appeared in English.
Two books are planned from it: a Reader's Edition, the translation with a primer that assumes no physics and the 1694 engravings printed beside clean redrawings, and a Scholar's Edition, the same translation with the full apparatus.
Why these books
A surprising number of the books that made modern science have never been translated. They sit in library scans, in a French or a Latin most readers cannot follow, cited by people who have not read them. The engravings get reproduced; the argument around them does not.
Homunculus Cabinet translates them whole — the digressions, the quarrels with rivals, the arithmetic that does not work — and prints what the page actually says, with a note where it says something wrong.
If one could see the little animal through the skin which hides it, we should see it perhaps as this figure represents it. Hartsoeker, Essay on Dioptrics, 1694 — Chapter X, Article LXXXIX
What is on the bench
Essay on Dioptrics — Reader's Edition
The complete translation with a reader's primer, a note on the text, and the 1694 engravings printed beside redrawings made to the proportions Hartsoeker's own words specify.
Essay on Dioptrics — Scholar's Edition
The same translation with its full apparatus: every reading and how it was taken from the page, a fuller comparison of two copies of the first edition, and the notes the Reader's Edition withdrew, each with its reason.
The homunculus, after Hartsoeker
What the most reproduced drawing in the history of embryology actually claimed, what Hartsoeker actually wrote beneath it, and what people have said it meant ever since.