Cities were growing, industries being founded; while Nation States defined their boundaries and eradicated their minorities, religious and esthetical tastes clashed, and wars tore incessantly to and fro across the continent: redefining ideologies, displacing people, transforming landscapes, stimulating trade.  As an aggregate effect of all this, society's demands for effective and large-scale integration were rapidly increasing: money was becoming a major determinant of life, infrastructures were expanding, and people, as a result, were forced to move faster, further, more frequently, and to adapt more flexibly to the time-schedules of a constantly changing world. Foucault himself explicitly brackets all such concerns. Nevertheless it is clear that there is a basic congruence between these wider social changes and the transformations of scientific thought that he describes: an organismic logic of magic and resemblance is being replaced by a 'geometric' logic of representation, in which the language of intellectual analysis is no longer modelled directly on the sensory world, but seems rather to "hover" above it, like a crystalline geometrical "web" (the 'Table', in Foucault's terminology).  The dense Medieval undergrowth of meaningful affinities has become a clear-cut classificatory structure.  The world no longer speaks its mysteries to us directly, but through its reflections in the mirror of mathematized language, which was soon to become the language of technological change:    "If natural, a sign is [now] no more than an element selected from the world of things and constituted as a sign by our knowledge.  It is therefore strictly limited, rigid, inconvenient, and impossible for the mind to master.  When, on the other hand, one establishes a conventional sign, it is always possible (and indeed necessary) to choose it in such a way that it will be simple, easy to remember, applicable to an indefinite number of elements, susceptible of subdivision within itself and of combination with other signs; the man-made sign is the sign at the peak of its activity."    On a stylistic level, the ever-expanding Linnéan Table of representations is geometrically defined: it deploys our sensory web in space. The Table consists of classificatory "cells", the characteristics of which may be completely and consistently defined in numerical terms.  As a result, any empirical phenomenon may now be exhaustively classified by a list of the "qualities" (color, weight, shape, meaning, logical class, order of priority), which together define its identity, its "place in the Table", in the order of things.  This magic of numbers, which is one of the most potent legacies of Mediterranean Antiquity to classical Europe, retains its dominant position in intellectual discourse throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and remains a powerful force to this day. We recognize it in one of its most conspicuous transformations as the magic of money.  For scientists three hundred years ago, it represented a triumph of Ockamian clarification: "the long concatenations of simple and easy reasoning which geometricians use in achieving their most difficult demonstrations gave me occasion to imagine," Descartes tells us, "that all matters which may enter the human mind were interrelated in the same fashion."