Representing Mechanical Arts in Diderot's Encyclopedie

摘要

A single art about which one would want to represent everything and say everything would furnish volumes of discourse [written texts] & plates. One would never finish if one proposed to render in figures all the states through which a piece of iron passes before being transformed into a needle. That the discourse follow the process of the artist to the last detail, fine. As for the figures, we have restricted them to the important movements of the worker & only the moments of the operation that are very easy to depict and very difficult to explain.