The pipe organ presented early modern science with a pneumatic black box of suggestive dimensions: while producing musical pitches and intervals that corresponded with those of an acoustic device like the monochord, pipe dimensions approached, but yet confounded clear association with the behavior of strings. Nevertheless, investigators like Vincenzo Galilei (c.1520–1591) and Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) continued to rely conceptually upon the monochord and the traditional ratios associated with it in their attempts to discipline the complex variables attending the acoustic properties of pipes. Thus, while certain conventions of historiography associate Vincenzo and Mersenne with a “disenchantment” of Pythagorean traditions that ostensibly retarded the development of an early modern physico-mathematics, their ratios of pipe scaling reveal instead a robust and evolving contribution of Pythagoreanism to mathematical reading of the Book of Nature.

Friedrich Nietzsche figures prominently in the transcript of the Scopes trial (1925), introduced by the prosecution as the exemplary philosopher of evolutionary theory, and furthermore recalled as the exculpatory influence for Darrow's notorious defense of Leopold and Loeb (1924). Although Nietzsche's polemical style may provoke such partisanship, his Genealogy of Morality (1887) nonetheless provides a compelling critical perspective on the scientific, religious, social and moral concerns contested in Dayton. In particular, Nietzsche's genealogy of the scientist in terms of the ascetic ideal brings penetrating insight to the shared ambitions of defense and prosecution, and the corresponding intensity of their polemical engagement.