The Origins of the Royal Society Revisited (original) (raw)
Related papers
History of Science, 1999
The precise intellectual status of the Royal Society of London in the mid-eighteenth century continues to be a vexed matter in further need of archival retrieval and historical exploration. Previously, historians have tended to identify a general state of decline in the Society in the decades following the death in 1727 of its most prestigious president, Sir Isaac Newton. There have, however, been two important recent calls for reappraisal by David Miller (1989) and Richard Sorrenson (1996), aptly and deservingly calling this picture into question.' Miller rightly observes that "The Society's eighteenth-century existence has attracted little attention among modem scholars't.? a fact which in itself portrays, and possibly even contributes to, a picture of decline. Sorrenson's admirable revisionary essay has argued that the status of the Society at mid-century must be wholly reassessed and has labelled the idea of a condition or state of decline a "misperception". Sorrenson suggests furthermore that "the Society experienced a period of significant productivity and growth throughout the eighteenth century", devoting itself to "a vibrant instrumental empiricism in general and to the important imperial science of mixed mathematics in particular".' He also highlights the pecuniary importance of non-active Fellows to the Society, claiming that "bereft of any regular state support, [it] could not have carried out its main functions-validating experimental results, facilitating communication and publication, organizing expeditions, and acknowledging exemplary achievement-without the subscription of all its Fellows".' In this paper we aim to continue the important work of these scholars by examining a previously overlooked figure in the history of the Royal Society at mid-century: its president, the natural philosopher and antiquarian Martin Folkes (1690-1754), and to reexamine the infamous attack upon his presidency by John Hill. Folkes's presidency ran from 1741 to 1752, with Hill being the Society's greatest and most persistent eighteenthcentury critic. Hill has, of course, been written upon at some length, but we shall not confine our material on Folkes's presidency to Hill. We shall also bring in here new "voices" raised against Folkes. These include that well-known diarist of the Society'S meetings, Dr William Stukeley, and certain opponents of Folkes's
‘Too much for mee to speake of’: the many facets of John Wallis's life and legacy
Notes and Records: the Royal Society journal of the history of science, 2018
Many early modern men and women left behind documents and artefacts that suggested how they wanted to be remembered. By the time John Wallis, the Oxford-based mathematician and theologian, had died in 1703, he had left several such items for future generations. For instance, in 1697, he wrote an autobiographical letter to his friend Thomas Smith, fellow of Magdalen College. The letter begins with an account of how Wallis, born in Ashford, Kent, in 1616 to a minister and his wife, spent his childhood at schools in Kent and Essex before he matriculated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1632. After graduating BA (1637) and MA (1640) from Emmanuel, Wallis was ordained as a minister and might have stayed on the clerical career path if not for certain unexpected developments, described in his letter, that led him toward a different career. In particular, Wallis explained how he discovered his aptitude for mathematics when, while home from Cambridge for Christmas in 1631, he learned basic arithmetic from his brother, who was training for a career as a draper. Wallis's natural mathematical ability would prove invaluable when, in 1649, he was installed as Savilian Professor of Geometry despite having little mathematical training. Although the reasons for his appointment were at least partly political, 1 the results were spectacular: Wallis published a flurry of groundbreaking mathematical works during the 1650s, and he went on to enjoy a long and productive mathematical career for the next half-century. The rest of Wallis's autobiographical letter focuses on the significant events in which he participated throughout his life, from serving as a scribe in the Westminster Assembly of Divines to the founding of the Royal Society of London, of which he was an active member. 2 These were the aspects of his career that Wallis sought to preserve for posterity; accordingly, this special issue considers his work as a mathematician, natural philosopher and divine. The letter to Smith was not the only document that Wallis produced in order to shape his legacy as a scholar. In the same period, he published his three-volume Opera mathematica (1693-1699), a Latin collection of his extensive mathematical writings that, he hoped, would secure his scholarly reputation after his death. This effort apparently succeeded: an account of the third volume in the Opera credited Wallis with many of the 'great Improvements that have been made in Mathematical Learning' in the second half of the seventeenth century. 3 Wallis sent copies of the Opera to prominent friends and acquaintances, including the famous diarist Samuel Pepys. 4 Pepys was certainly convinced of Wallis's massive influence on the intellectual world. As he wrote to Arthur Charlett in 1698, 'Dr. Wallis is truly too much for mee to speake of, or speake to; soe much I revere him, & yet soe much more is hee to bee rever'd.' 5 This admiration for Wallis inspired Pepys to commission a portrait of the mathematician by the contemporary artist, Godfrey Kneller, for which Wallis sat in 1701. The portrait, which now hangs in the Examination Schools at Oxford and which appears on the cover of this issue, is another item whose imagery offers insights about how Wallis sought to be remembered. Here Wallis, dressed in the traditional red and black robes of a Doctor of Divinity, stands next to a table on which rests a bound volume, representing the Latin
Springer Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, 2020
The Royal Society of London is the world’s oldest scientific institution, dating from the late seventeenth century. Throughout its early years, members of the society engaged in the practice and promotion of experimental philosophy and established international networks of correspondence dedicated to the exchange and preservation of experimental knowledge. In addition to establishing the world’s first scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society, the society also published a wide range of original works and translations of foreign research. This entry covers the earliest years of the society, from its establishment in 1660 to the beginning of Newton’s presidency in 1703.
Joseph Banks and William Hunter: where the Royal Society meets the Royal Academy
Journal for Maritime Research, 2019
The physician, anatomist and man-midwife, Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) and the gentleman-scientist, Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) shared similar objectives for the advancement of the natural sciences in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both men were naturalists, engaged in personal and organisational pursuit of collecting and disseminating various forms of early scientific information. While Hunter concentrated on developing anatomy as a form of useful knowledge, Banks's efforts centred on botany, a field of natural history crucial to Enlightenment ideas of improvement, of 'knowledge and social utility combined'. 1 This essay describes their interconnected associations, affiliations and dealings, as patrons and collectors, and principal advisors in these emergent disciplines. Together, both Banks and Hunter contributed to Enlightenment views of public discourse surrounding the production of useful knowledge, in gathering and distributing the visual and material artefacts of exploration, forensic investigation, collation, and categorisation. Importantly, in their professional and personal activities both men highlighted developing forms of artistic practice and nascent theories of visual arts and how these would enhance and increase the circulation of natural knowledge. There is no doubt that Banks and Hunter exercised comparable approaches, supporting the integration of written descriptions and images, and how this aided comprehension but, as this essay suggests, their opinions often diverged on the methods and purposes of the visual arts, within a more generalised cultural sphere amongst members of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Arts, during the period. From Soho Square to Great Windmill Street As for many eighteenth-century collectors, Banks and Hunter prioritised finding individual houses in London where they could establish their museums. These Two 'centres of calculation' were situated within a short walking distance of each other, in the city of Westminster. 2 (fig. 1 and fig. 2). The sites of both houses were located within the major developments taking place in London at this time, and typical of these redesigns of the city are John Gwynn's London and Westminster Improved, 1766, incorporating: 'new royal parks and palaces, open quays along the Thames with a new bridge, a grid of squares and thoroughfares, and the meticulously detailed straightening of the crooked streets and alleys of the old metropolis.' 3 Gwynn's plans sought to articulate a response in urban design to the collaborative nature of economic and social conservativism, characteristic of both Banks's and Hunter's sense of Enlightenment improvement. 4 Among the newly-paved, clean and well-lit streets of Westminster, Joseph Banks's house, 32 Soho Square, and William Hunter's home, 16 Great Windmill Street, dominated the corresponding cultural landscapes of natural history and anatomy, supplying a burgeoning early scientific community access to an increasingly dynamic range of resources. The homes of both men included impressive museums, libraries, and herbariums; with Hunter's house notable by the presence of a fully-integrated anatomical theatre. This essay describes how these closely interconnected, metropolitan, spaces reflected the many combined interests of the private worlds of Banks and Hunter and the goals of the public institutions which both men served. Joseph Banks bought the lease to 32 Soho Square in 1777, following his return from the first of Captain Cook's voyages. He had previously rented a house nearby in New Burlington Street, which contained a 'perfect museum' but which, by the late 1770s proved to be too small to contain his growing collections 5. The details of
Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, 2014
Thomas Birch (1705-66), Secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765, and Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke (1720-90), wrote a 'Weekly Letter' from 1741 to 1766, an unpublished correspondence of 680 letters now housed in the British Library (Additional Mss 35396-400). The article examines the dimensions and purposes of this correspondence, an important conduit of information for the influential coterie of the 'Hardwicke circle' gathered around Yorke in the Royal Society. It explores the writers' self-conception of the correspondence, which was expressed in deliberately archaic categories of seventeenth-century news exchange, such as the newsletter, aviso and a-la-main. It shows how the letter writers negotiated their difference in status through the discourse of friendship, and concludes that the 'Weekly Letter' constituted for the correspondents a form of private knowledge, restricted in circulation to their discrete group, and as such unlike th...