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T IS AN HONOR to have been asked to write about my associations with the History of Science Society, with which I was in close touch for some fifteen years; with Isis, in which my first paper appeared nearly fifty years ago; and with the many illustrious persons associated with both. When I began the study of history of science there was a society and a journal, but few professional practitioners of the field in the United States except for George Sarton, the founder and editor of Isis. Most of those who had helped to found the History of Science Society, although keenly interested in the field, were by profession historians, literary men, philosophers, scientists, or medical men. (I deliberately follow here the linguistic usage of the times, and indeed there were then and for some time to come more men than women in the field.) The true pioneers, my immediate seniors, were few: Bernard Cohen, Henry Guerlac, and Marshall Clagett, all just beginning their careers at the time of the first American involvement in World War II. I can claim to be

When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its initiators were far from being young men, as one would expect remembering that the long-lived John Wallis (1616-1703) gave its origins as lying in meetings begun as long before as 1645. Fifteen years after that date, most of its founders were, in 1660, well on in their 40s; even among the original Fellows of 1663 the youngest were Christopher Wren (38 in 1660), Robert Boyle (33) and William Croone (27), nor were the first recruits to the new, formal Society younger. Hence it is not surprising that the next 20 years saw the loss through death of the majority of them, nor that those who survived into the 1680s slowly withdrew from active participation in the meetings. Even Robert Hooke, only 27 when appointed Curator of Experiments in 1662, was by 1680 well on in years by 17th-century usage, and reasonably more interested in his various professional activities than anxious to labour at performing repetitions of experiments for the edification of fellow-members.

No editors of a correspondence can ever be sure of having found every extant letter or of having supplied all relevant facts or of having made no errors, and we are no exceptions. During the long period between the appearance of volume XI and the final two volumes many scholars kindly sent information to add to what we had already published, including new letters. This, together with addenda which we ourselves had discovered, was published in Vol. XIII (pp.378-436), under the heading 'Additions and corrections to earlier volumes'. Since then, other discoveries and additional information have been sent to us which add to our knowledge of Henry Oldenburg as a person and as Secretary to the Royal Society 1662-1677. Because nothing of all this seriously calls in question anything contained in the editorial matter of the Correspondence but only adds to it, and because no one of the newly found letters is of novel importance, although all are well worth recording, all the supplementary information received is given below in the most succinct possible form, the letters themselves (only one by Oldenburg) being paraphrased in English. As before, new letters are given the number of the letter which immediately precedes them in date with the addition of the suffix 'bis': thus 583bis of 10 November 1666 follows letter 583 of 7 November. Where possible, additional information is given under the heading of the letter to which it best relates. A few interesting items relating to the fate of Oldenburg's children after his death follow the letters themselves. Our grateful thanks go to the following: to Professor Richard Popkin, who very kindly gave us valuable information about the Dury Papers in Zurich and drew our attention to the Pell Papers in the British Library; to Professor Albert Van Helden, who sent a list of Cassini letters in the University Library of Pisa

Michael Hunter, Establishing the new science: the experience of the early Royal Society . Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989. Pp. xiv+382. £45. ISBN 0-85115-506-5. Francis Bacon as a young man claimed, 'I have taken all learning to be my province’. Michael H unter might justly claim to have taken the 17th century Royal Society as his. Over the past 20 years he has produced a profusion of articles, monographs and books dealing in detail with the institutional aspects of the Society between 1660 and 1700, based upon an unmatched survey of its activities as embodied in its manuscripts and related printed works, and now he has given us a compendium of all that he has learned in Establishing the new science . At a time when ‘social history’ is occupying so much of modern historians’ interest, this new work will be essential reading. Not that the institutional history of the Royal Society has been totally neglected over the years. Fifty years ago Sir Henry Lyons, then Treasurer of the Society, began the well-known work published four years later as The Royal Society 1660-1940. A history of its administration under its Charters , devoted primarily to the day-to-day running of the Society, an invaluable account of its formal existence, its personnel and its organization, with something about its promotion of science. At the same time, interest was turning to the problem of the pre-history of the Society, that is, what lay behind the famous organizational meeting of November 1660. A spate of articles appeared interpreting the known facts in different ways, the arguments put forward being definitively and cogently examined by R.H. Syfret in this journal under the title ‘Origins of the Royal Society’.

This “millennial issue” of the Royal Society's history of science journal differs little from normal issues except in the content of the customary brief preface by the then editor, Sir Alan Cook FRS. When Notes and Records of the Royal Society began under the anonymous editorship of the then librarian, H W Robinson, it was conceived as an “in house” periodical detailing the current affairs of the Society (now long since transferred elsewhere) together with some brief historical notes, to be distributed exclusively to Fellows. By 1940 it had begun to be what it has remained, a learned journal devoted to any aspect of the Society and its Fellows, with articles by both Fellows and non-Fellows and normal rules of subscription. Since 1960 it has been edited by a (named) Fellow with the assistance of a committee or advisory board (nowadays named in each issue) always containing some historians of science or medicine. The journal now appears three times a year and the previously sober cover has been replaced by an attractively coloured and illustrated one, different for each issue. The prevailing tone tends to be factual rather than analytical so that it usefully complements existing professional journals. Although articles on medical Fellows (who were most numerous in the nineteenth century) are not common in Notes and Records, there are usually some biologically orientated articles well worth reading. Here are a dozen mostly short articles together with a book review (usually several), the annual Anniversary address by the President (Sir Aaron Klug) and a note by a member of staff on Jstor, which permits access to the Society's scientific journals since their commencement in 1665. Readers of Medical History can surely find the general articles here of interest, these being ‘The history of science and the image of science’ by William Shea, who considers briefly the public attitudes to science at the present time; an intriguing survey of “Predictions”, a well-chosen review of the (mostly erroneous) attempts by distinguished scientists to predict likely and unlikely achievements in science and technology, by John Meurig Thomas FRS; and ‘History of science and technology in education and training in Europe’ by Professor Claude Debru of Paris, an abstract of a lecture given at an international conference on the subject. There are also a number of articles for biologists: Brian Ford on ‘The Royal Society and the microscope’, a well illustrated account of its history from 1663 to the present, best on the later period; Graham E Budd on the ideas of various Royal Society Fellows on palaeontology, from the seventeenth century to the present, also best on the later period (specifically note 5 is incorrect and the citation is erroneous); G E Fogg FRS, ‘The Royal Society and the South Seas’, the longest article and the most like usual articles in the journal, an excellent factual survey; and two brief articles by the editor, ‘Pictures of plants illustrating exotic collections’ (in the Society's archives) and ‘Royal weather’ surveying a few of the Society's contributions to meteorology. Less relevant are two further articles by the editor, ‘Time and the Royal Society’ and ‘The centenary of the National Physical Laboratory,’ and ‘Zenographic longitude systems and Jupiter's differential rotation’ by Raymond Hide, only for the mathematically and astronomically competent.

With the inauguration of Newton's Presidency, much was to change within the Society and with the perception of it by outsiders. Most strikingly, it is for this period impossible to separate the office from the office-holder, the Royal Society from its President, and Newton the natural philosopher from Sir Isaac Newton P.R.S. The two rapidly became one in most eyes, so that the Society received the credit for Newton's fame and influence, while he in turn took on the attributes of the Royal Society. Relations between the Society and individuals at home and abroad were also coloured by the fact of Newton's Presidency. Sloane remained an active Secretary for ten years, corresponding as before with, particularly, natural historians, medical men, and his French friends (he joined Newton as an associe etranger of the Academie Royale des Sciences in 1709); after that as a Vice-President he presided at meetings when Newton was not present and of course continued much of his correspondence and influence, although less publicly. In 1713 Halley became Secretary so that now official correspondence took on a more astronomical bent. The publication of Opticks and the growing number of adherents to the Newtonian natural philosophy meant an enormous growth in knowledge and understanding of the Royal Society's empirical programme, now ineluctably merged with the dominating figure of its President, even though the cult of Newtonianism associated with the Enlightenment lay still in the future. Learned visitors were eager to view the Royal Society and its President, one of the essential ‘sights’ of London.

In spite of all that has been written in the past decades about the first half-century of the Royal Society's existence, no one has so far examined just what took place at the Society's weekly meetings nor how far they fulfilled the expressed aim of promoting 'experimental learning'. Students of the early Royal Society have often taken its aim to have been fully expressed in the writings of such Fellows as Boyle, Hooke and Newton, aware that Hooke especially performed very many experiments at the meetings between 1662 and 1703, while he and others wrote about the necessity of doing so. This study attempts to analyse the content of the meetings in detail in order to discover how far and in what manner the aims of the Society were fulfilled in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This book for the first time explores the practices of the Society's Fellows, and shows how these altered between 1660 and 1727.

The words of John Wallis with their assumptions about the mathematico-empirical nature of true natural philosophy,2 apply as well to English science of the nineteenth century as they do to English science of the midseventeenth century. As earlier, English scientists in the nineteenth century were deeply concerned about the proper organization of their subject, that is, how best to combine mathematics and empiricism. Individual sciences like mechanics or theoretical astronomy did not, of course, experience any difficulty, for Newton had apparently set the model. Moreover, it is important to remember that Cambridge-educated scientists, of whom there were many, all had, through the tripos system, a full and thorough exposure to mathematics and mathematical physics, so that even when their interests later turned to empirical science they had an appreciation and understanding of the use of mathematical concepts in organizing their subjects. The classic treatises dealing with the so-called “inductive” sciences are, in fact, by just such Cambridge-trained men, notably John Herschel and William Whewell, and it is worth noting that even such seemingly purely mathematical physicists as Clerk Maxwell and G. G. Stokes were well aware of the problems inherent in more empirically oriented subjects like electricity or meteorology.

The Writings of John Evelyn (edited and typeset by Guy de la Bédoyère). Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1995. Pp. 435, £39.50. ISBN 0-85115-631-2 Since 1818, John Evelyn has been chiefly remembered for his Diary , which then shed new light on the political, social and practical affairs of seventeenth-century England. That edition, intended to show how sober, temperate, useful and pious a ‘Cavalier’ might be, was reprinted many times. In 1955 the complete text as Evelyn left it was published by E.S. de Beer and in 1994 G. de la Bédoyère published a selection from the full modern text. Evelyn was, all his life, an indefatigable, prolific and long-winded writer, whether on politics, religion, natural history or personal subjects, an inveterate employer of classical quotations, who seems never to have disciplined his prose. He was also an industrious translator, earlier from Latin, later mainly from French, often on gardening subjects. The present volume reprints nine works, dating from 1659 to 1666, although Evelyn never stopped writing and revised his earlier works in later editions.

Robert Boyle by Himself and his Friends with a fragment of William Wotton’s lost 'Life of Boyle’ . Edited with an introduction by Michael Hunter. London, William Pickering, 1994. Pp. ciii+188, £49.95. ISBN 1-85196-085-6 What is interesting to posterity about the archives of a distinguished scientist? Fellows of the Royal Society would almost certainly say the manner in which he (or nowadays she) practised his profession, made his discoveries and analysed the natural world. Thirty years ago historians of science held the same view; now they are generally more interested in the personality, beliefs, non-scientific influences and cultural milieu of the individual. Hence this book. The author has come to dominate Boyle studies by having the Royal Society Boyle Papers catalogued to make access easy for younger historians and is preparing a complete edition with detailed textual criticism of all Boyle’s surviving works and letters, published and unpublished.

Frances Willmoth, Sir Jonas Moore: Practical Mathematics and Restoration Science . Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1993. Pp.xi+244. £35. ISBN 0-85115-321-6 Jonas Moore (1617-79) is a slightly anomalous figure in the seventeenth- century scientific scene, well known but in some ways obscure. He belongs partly to the history of elementary mathematics: his major publication was Moores Arithmetick (1650 and several other editions); this is largely but not wholly based on the work of Oughtred, whom Moore cited as one to whom he owed ‘all the Mathematicall Knowledge I have’ (a statement not to be taken literally, as Dr Willmoth stresses). That few copies now survive shows, as with most works of arithmetic at the time, that it was used by practical men and read to death. Moore belongs as well to the history of practical mathematics: he worked for some seven years in the 1650s as Surveyor to the Earl of Bedford’s Fen Drainage Company and produced an often-reprinted map at the end of it; this led to his being asked in 1663 to undertake an expedition to Tangier which resulted in a map of the city and its confines. He also produced a map of the Thames in 1663 and a survey of London after the Great Fire. In 1663 he became Surveyor of the Ordnance, based on the Tower of London. From this position he found it easy to enter into the scientific world of Restoration London: he was elected F.R.S. in 1674 and immediately put on the Council (1675-78); he became the patron of many young practical mathematicians; perhaps Moore’s greatest claim to fame was his patronage of the young John Flamsteed and his critical role in creating for Flamsteed the post of Astronomer Royal (1675) and helping to supply him with the necessary instruments.

J. Trevor Hughes, Thomas Willis 1621-1675: His Life and Work. London, Royal Society of Medicine Services, 1991. Pp. xvi + 151, £12.95 (hdbk), £7.95 (pbk). ISBN 1-85315-162-9 Dr Thomas Willis, although a Fellow of the nascent Royal Society in 1661, and before that a leading Oxford medical man, is probably less well known than his contemporaries. Partly this is because he stayed firmly in Oxford until 1667, after which a busy and lucrative London practice occupied him fully. Partly it is because his writings on anatomy, medical theory, physiology (especially nervous physiology) and medical practice, all influenced by current chemical ideas, are difficult to understand nowadays, although they reflected glory upon himself and the Royal Society when published. This little book, issued by the Royal Society of Medicine in the ‘Eponymists in Medicine’ series, seeks to redress this failure. Dr Hughes, himself a retired neuropathologist, has produced a brief, informative account of Willis’s life and work from the point of view of his achievements in medical and anatomical successes, drawing on both primary and secondary sources.

Biographers of Samuel Pepys (1633- 1703) tend to emphasize the fact that there was much more to his life than the famous Diary , which he abandoned in his 33rd year. Great trials in the time of the Popish Plot, great connections with the King and the Duke of York (later King James II), great office as Secretary of the Admiralty, and the finest parts of his life’s work were yet before him. As part of it, he would certainly have included his Presidency of the Royal Society, though most of what we know of Pepys and the Society comes from the Diary . He was elected F.R.S. on 15 February 1665, and was President from 30 November 1684 until 30 November 1686.

It is very gratifying to have a part to play in this happy and auspicious centenary occasion which celebrates Thomas Henry Huxley’s appointment as President of the Royal Society and at the same time demonstrates the commemorative sense of recent Councils in nominating his grandson to the same position at such a suitable time. As I am an historian you will no doubt expect me to give you at least a few more dates; and as this audience is mainly composed of scientists, I imagine that you would like to be provided with at least some facts. I shall try to meet these joint expectations while avoiding excess— for I am all too conscious of my presumption, as a complete outsider to both the Royal Society and the Huxley family, in speaking to you at all about my assigned subject. To begin with, let me briefly describe the state of the Royal Society as it was in 1846 when Thomas Henry Huxley first encountered some of its Fellows, shortly after his appointment to the Haslar Naval Hospital. His chief, Sir John Richardson, had been a Fellow for 20 years and he introduced the young man of 21 to a number of ‘the scientific folks’ as Huxley himself called them.

HOW do scientists work ? This is an intriguing question, never easy to resolve satisfactorily, especially as they themselves are unreliable witnesses. With contemporaries one can try to unravel their thread of argument from many sources: from what they remember (or profess to remember), from notebooks, correspondence, the testimony of collaborators and friends. For the past the situation is necessarily worse; not only is there a paucity of manuscript evidence but, worse, scientists did not, for the most part, think of such things as being of interest to readers. Even for Newton, one of the most self-conscious of workers, whose compulsion to preserve written materials has resulted in the survival of a truly enormous mass of papers, the evidence is sketchy; and for others, especially before the 19th century, the situation is more difficult. It is, however, often possible to hazard plausible reconstructions, and this is particularly the case with Robert Boyle, for there is a collection of his surviving manuscripts in the Royal Society (Boyle Papers), and these papers, with the hints that he and his ‘publishers’ (editors) left in the prefaces to his printed works, offer possibilities for discovering his methods of work in some detail and his over-all plan for his life-work.

THE modern scientist or historian looking back at the first quarter-century of The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (to give it its original full name, for once), sees an organization of scientists and lovers of science which successfully fostered, encouraged and honoured the best scientific brains of a seminal period in science, when an extraordinary number of these brains were English. It is not easy to decide which among its many aims was responsible for its noted success, nor is it necessary to assume that a simple analysis would suffice. Many would see the prime factor to lie in its adherence to principles of experimental science; others to its bringing together of diverse kinds of men and the encouragement of virtuosi everywhere; others to the social background of the age (2). One, possibly minor but nevertheless important factor, was its role in diffusing information throughout the world of learning, and its encouragement to Fellows and non-Fellows alike to communicate to the world the information they possessed and the discoveries they had made.

Discussion of the origins of the Royal Society, or more accurately of the background to that historic meeting on 28 November 1660 at which ‘something was offered about a design of founding a college for the promotion of physico-mathematical experimental learning’ (1), has turned upon two hypotheses, each associated with a major contemporary narrative and an intellectual thesis (2). The first of these attaches primary importance to Gresham College, London, as providing the site and occasion for the first scientific meetings of which that just mentioned was the lineal successor; the second, discounting the claims of the first, contends that the earliest organized meetings of scientists in England took place somewhat later at Oxford, and that these were virtually removed to Gresham College but little before the Restoration.

The main outlines of Henry Oldenburg’s public career have long been known: ample evidence of bis activity as working secretary of the Royal Society from early in its history until his death in 1677 is furnished by Birch’s History of the Royal Society , by the very existence of the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions , and by the archives of the Society. As we hope to show by editing Oldenburg’s correspondence in extenso , his exchange of letters with hundreds of learned men provides a valuable source for an understanding of the way in which scientific enterprise was conducted in the seventeenth century as well as for the understanding of many obscure points of the development of scientific thought. The correspondence also provides materials relating to Oldenburg’s own career. In spite of the detailed account in the Dictionary of National Biography , which made use of material collected from the Bremen Archives for information touching his ancestry, education and diplomatic career, Oldenburg’s private life has remained remarkably enigmatic. For example the exact date of his birth is unknown, his activities between the end of his formal education (1639) and his appearance as a diplomat in England (1653) hitherto untraced, his first wife’s name apparently unrecorded, and his means of livelihood mysterious. In the course of preparing for the press the first volume of our projected edition (to the end of 1662) we have found clues to illuminate the first two problems; work on the next two volumes (1663-5, and 1666-7, respectively) has illuminated the two latter problems.

THE academic scientist of the fifteenth and early sixteenth cen turies has often appeared to historians to be a reactionary, pedantically pursuing the literal words of ancient authors at the expense of the fertile ideas of his immediate predecessors. Yet time and again the most stimulating scientists clothed their ideas in the language of humanism and, indeed, seem to have derived them from the same fount at which the pedants worshiped. We are so familiar with the fact that Copernicus felt himself to be only a latter day Pythagorean and Stevin a latter day Archimedes, that the early-sixteenth-century anatom ists were only following the method of the newly discovered works of Galen, and the naturalists were tracking down the mysteries of Aristotle's "History of Animals," that we have accepted the fact that?however mis guided in its expressed purpose?humanism had a genuinely vital contri bution to make to early modern science. And indeed there are few impor tant aspects of sixteenth-century science which are not enriched with humanist learning and Greek discovery. Aside from magnetism?itself a part of natural magic which drew on the ancients for some of its inspira tion?only chemistry seems to have escaped the prevailing humanist influence, pursuing new ideas and methods without apparent benefit from Greek theory and practice. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the exaggerated mysticism associ ated with alchemy was only possible because of the lack of associated Greek rationalism which might have acted as a counterweight to the accumulated irrationalism of centuries. True, the Greek theory of matter, with its transmutable elements constituting the universe from the time of Aristotle, lies at the basis of the more philosophic part of alchemical theory, as Hopkins long ago pointed out.1 And Aristotle's theory of matter could be used to support the possibility of transmutation, though few chemists were interested in so using it before the development of theoretical chem istry in the early seventeenth century. But by and large chemistry drew what historical tradition it possessed from the immediate, rather than from the remote, past, in spite of the bogus historicism which permitted the attribution of modern works to authors long dead. The most obviously rational part of sixteenth-century chemistry would

Henry Miles was the epitome of the eighteenth century’s version of the virtuoso, a perfect pattern to which many Fellows (and more would-be Fellows) aspired. In the Dictionary of National Biography he is succinctly characterized as ‘dissenting minister and scientific writer’. Little record of his clerical activities remain, though he was a highly esteemed member of the learned dissenting world. He spent his active life in Tooting (Surrey), where his only published sermon was preached under the gently pious title Doing Good, and Communicating Sacrifices Well-pleasing to God (London, 1738) to the ‘Society for the Relief of the Widows and Orphans of Dissenting Ministers’. He was made honorary D.D. of Aberdeen in 1744, for what reason is not clear. Even the clergyman who preached his funeral oration could find little beyond conventional platitudes to say of his professional life, though his character was clearly above reproach: ‘the simplicity of his spirit and manners, was very remarkable. He was free from all guile himself, and absolutely unacquainted with the deceitful ways of man. His conversation, though instructive and entertaining, was the furthest possible from being assuming. His countenance was always open, mild and amiable; and his carriage so condescending and courteous, even to his inferiors, as plainly discovered a most humane and benevolent heart’ (1). Like his younger contemporary, Gilbert White, Miles’s real interests lay far from his duties. ‘Scientific writer’ is certainly an exaggeration: yet Miles was the author of some thirty papers in the Philosophical Transactions after 1741. Many of these are meteorological; some are microscopical; the most important are electrical.

In his Bibliography of the Honourable Robert Boyle (ist ed. 1932, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1961), Dr Fulton has stated: ‘ The History of Cold seems never to have been translated into Latin.’ This conclusion is based on the fact that no Enghsh, American or Canadian library canvassed by Dr Fulton contained a copy of the Latin version, nor had it appeared for sale in any book catalogue seen in his survey. Yet there is ample evidence that a Latin translation of New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold (London, 1665 and 1683) was in fact made; that it was at least partly printed off; and that a completed edition may have been sold entire to a bookseller in Holland. The evidence for the possible existence of such an edition is to be found in the extensive correspondence between Henry Oldenburg, ‘publisher’ of the Enghsh edition of Cold and Secretary of the Royal Society, and Robert Boyle, who was mainly living in Oxford in the years 1664-66. Oldenburg’s side of the correspondence was printed by Thomas Birch in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (London, 5 vols., 1744, 6 vols., 1772); Boyle’s scantier extant letters are to be found in the letterbooks of the Royal Society (MS. Bi).

RÉSUMÉ. — L'industrie chimique en Grande-Bretagne au xixe siècle prit son essor à partir de la chimie française du xvine siècle ; mais elle impliquait non pas tant la compétence dans les sciences que l'invention de techniques appropriées.

One of the best-known passages in Oldenburg’s biography came from the pen—in this case the kindly pen—of Anthony a Wood, writing of the University of Oxford in his own lifetime and Oldenburg’s arrival there in 1657: This Mr. Oldenburg died at Charlton near Greenwich in Kent in Aug. 1678 and was buried there, leaving then behind him issue (by his wife the dau. and only child of the learned John Dury a Scot, by whom he had an estate of 60 1. per an. in the marshes of Kent) a son named Rupert, godson to pr. Rupert, and a daughter called Sophia (1). Although the burden of Wood’s dirge is correct enough, the notes are not strictly accurate. If one consults that great work of eighteenth-century English local history, Edward Hasted’s History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent , one finds that the account of Charlton (today a part of London’s sprawl) includes a transcript of Wood’s words; but Oldenburg’s ashes in fact never lay there (2). Moreover, Wood post-dated Oldenburg’s death by some eleven months; as we have already shown, he died in early September 1677 and his wife a few days later (3).

For fifteen years, from 1662 until his death in 1677, Henry Oldenburg served the Royal Society as second Secretary and was charged with almost the entire burden of its correspondence, domestic and foreign. During this time he acted as a centre for the communication of scientific news, searching out new sources of information, encouraging men everywhere to make their work public, acting as an intermediary between scientists and, through the Philosophical Transactions, providing a medium for the publication of short scientific papers. Oldenburg's contribution to scientific communication was unique in the seventeenth century, not least because he represented the Royal Society (of which he was an original Fellow) and served all its members impartially. It is not too much to say that he invented the professions of scientific administrator and scientific journalist.