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Hooke’s notes in the margins of the folio are intriguing as it is possible that they can reveal more about his original purposes for the notes that he took from the Journal Books. Firstly, they confirm that, at least for the Journal Books covering the later period, he was actually copying from the same Journal Book that are in the Royal Society archive today. Numbers begin to be given at the end of the copy of Vol. 4, where Hooke lists the page numbers for the meetings of the dates referred to. From there onwards, throughout the fifth Journal Book (1672-77), the last before he became Secretary, Hooke lists the page numbers by the sides of experiments or discussions that he is referring to. In earlier sections of the copies from the Journal Book the most common marginal entries are ‘q’ , presumably a note to query the other records for corroboration of the interpretations containing in the Journal Books and ‘NB’, presumably prompting him to take note of the contents. Both markings appear throughout the copies from the Journal Books, beginning in 1662. In the section before Vol. 5, page numbers seem to have been added later, in the margin, or in some cases on the bindings.

The section at the end of Hooke’s list of page numbers from Vol. 4 also contains a date, 8 September 1694. This is three years before Waller claims that Hooke began to write his autobiography (mentioned in the previous post). Another reason that Hooke might have been scouring the Journal Books in 1694 was his on-going dispute with John Cutler over the non-payment over the salary he claimed was due to him for the Cutlerian lectures that he was supposed to deliver at Gresham College from around 1665-6 onwards. This dispute had been ongoing since the late 1670’s, but had taken a new turn with the death of John Cutler in 1693. The affair was then taken on by Cutler’s nephew, Edward Boulter, who had initially been forthcoming in response to Hooke’s demands for payment but . Although the Cutlerian lectures seem to have been conceived of as separate from the affairs of the Royal Society, Boulter’s defense of 1695 contended that he should be allowed to inspect the records of the Society to verify whether or not Hooke had performed the duties he claimed that he had. Although Boulter does not finally seem to have consulted the records to prove his case, it is likely that Hooke did: an entry in the Council Minutes of 20 June 1683 notes that Hooke was to be allowed access to the records of the Royal Society ‘on occasion of his business with John Cutler’. Between 1683 and 1694 would have been quite a feasible date for Hooke to begin making his copies from the Journal Books, a process which perhaps led him to reflect on the other injustices apparently done to his reputation in the official records of the Society and to begin to plan an autobiography to correct these apparent errors.

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