II.3 "an Animal in Quires"

One of Hooke's most enduring, and endearing, observations is of a period. Looked at under a microscope, the ostensibly round dots punctuating the page suddenly become "smutty daubings on a matt or uneven floor with a blunt extinguisht brand or stick's end" -- little more than "a great spatch of London dirt, about three inches over." And if full stops grow to three-inch dirt blobs, micrography -- that is, actual small writing -- metamorphose into "pitifull bungling scribbles and scrawls" under the microscope, "Arabian and China characters being almost as well shap'd." Thus an empty signifer from the legible world of print becomes a dirty thoroughfare, as linguistic curiousities that signify through their physical illegibility are orientalized, placed beyond the literacy of Hooke's readers. If the former renders print strange, it does so through images of the mundane; if the latter normalizes a curiosity, it does so by pointing out the obvious.