For Kircher, Mr. Glassie writes, “larger truths took precedence over smaller ones.” And that philosophy made him one of the biggest intellectuals of his moment, read (if not always admired) by luminaries like Huygens, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibniz. But by the 1670s, Kircher’s reputation was in decline. The “Latium,“ Kicher’s lushly illustrated account of the archaeology and natural history of the region around Rome, was harshly denounced for its inaccuracies. He feuded with a British scientist over which one of them had invented the megaphone. After the Florentine physician Francesco Redi published repeated debunkings of his work, Kircher enlisted a younger Jesuit to compose an “Apologetic Forerunner to Kircherian Studies” defending him against “the pestiferous breath of poisoned invectives.” It initially sold just two copies.

After 250 pages of determined intellectual rollick, Mr. Glassie turns serious in his conclusion, depicting Kircher as a noble seeker stranded on the wrong side of the scientific revolution. Isaac Newton may be hailed a founder of modern science, while Kircher is now “something of a joke.” But the gravitational force Newton described in the “Principia Mathematica”, Mr. Glassie notes rather wanly, was the kind of unseen, immaterial force “that Kircher would have said he’d already described, long before.”

Kircher would no doubt be dissatisfied by the more modest scientific achievements contemporary scholars have granted him, like the assessment that his mammoth study “Underground World” (which, among other things, identified the location of Atlantis) showed that he “understood erosion” and the practical uses of sand, as one writer quoted by Mr. Glassie puts it. Kircher might be even more dismayed with his enshrinement at the tongue-in-cheek Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, where an exhibit on his life sits near displays devoted to dogs of the Soviet space program and relics from trailer parks.

As for his own museum, it was dispersed in the decades after his death in 1680, and its most fantastic holdings — like the hydraulic machine topped by “a figure vomiting up various liquids for guests to drink” (as one account put it) — disappeared forever.

And that cat piano? Mr. Glassie notes that, contrary to common belief (and Wikipedia), it was not among the many bizarre instruments described in the 1,200-page Kircher treatise “Universal Music-Making.“ Which in the light of this quirky biography, may make the piano the most Kircherian relic of them all.