Waller Collection
I’ve just been referred to this searchable collection of document descriptions and images online, the Waller Collection from Uppsala University. It includes a letter from Hooke to his friend the MP, natural philosopher and antiquary James Long dated 1688 in which he discusses the auctioning of books, sends a new history of China along with some ‘very considerable relations’ of earthquakes in Peru, China, Spain, and India. Hooke puts forward a theory that ‘the Poysenous Exhalations that Issue from such Eruptions may have caused those Distempers in the seasons and constitutions of the air and euen of the helth of People, though in Countrys very Remote, which haue accompanyd them or been always contemporary’. He goes on to speculate that such noxious fumes might have contributed to the ‘Aguish distemper’ then affecting people in England and France, as well as to the plague spreading in Germany. Hooke was of course correct to assume that the effects of earthquakes could have long-term effects on public health through environmental contamination, although inaccurate in linking them to the plague.
Various references to earthquakes also appear in the Hooke folio. At a meeting of 20 June 1677, Hooke outlined his theory that hills and mountains had been originally thrown up by earthquakes. He illustrated this idea by referring to a cliff in his childhood home of the Isle of Wight ‘whose bottom is washt by the sea wherein at a pretty depth below the top and at many fathoms aboue the surface of the sea he found shells of seuerall sorts which he thinks may possibly haue been placed there by earthquakes remouing the superficiall parts of the earth Rasing the bottom of the sea and sinking the surface of the Land.’ He then supported his theory by reading from Varsenius’ account of a huge lake in China that was created after an earthquake. On 12 December the following year, Hooke returned to the subject of earthquakes, this time linking them to volcanoes in explain how metals like gold, which he reasoned were heavy and therefore ought to lie closer to the centre of earth, were occasionally brought closer to the surface. Christopher Wren also came up with various , rather less accurate, theories about what earthquakes could reveal about the earth, reasoning at a meeting of 12 January 1680 that earthquakes might occur when parts of the earth fell down into great subterranean caverns, this fall being the cause of the noise and shaking of the surface of the earth.
The collection also includes manuscripts from several other of the Society’s prominent members, including Joseph Banks, Isaac Newton, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and George Biddel Aidy.
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