Exploring our archives

Since my earlier post on mapping, I’ve been thinking about how modern mapping tools could be used to represent historical situations. Google is releasing several ‘mashup’ tools at the moment and one of the most useful is ‘My Maps’, which allows you to ‘tag’ certain points on a map and associate them with text, pictures or media files. I’ve begun experimenting with using this tool to map the correspondents of the Royal Society during the period of my interest, 1660-1670. This is very much a work in progress and undertaken very unscientifically (just using the contacts that I noted while going through the Hooke folio) but it still gives a visual idea of the scope of the Society’s interests in the period. The map is here. You can also view it in Google Earth by exporting the KML file by pressing the blue button at the top of the screen.

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Mechanics and the soul may seem like rather distant concepts these days, but the two concepts collided in the early debates of natural philosophy. Descartes, followed by mechanist philosophers like Gassendi (translated by Walter Charleton, FRS) had challenged atomist ideas with their conceptions of the universe as governed by mechanical laws, a mechanical concept of the workings of the human being was perhaps a natural progression.

At a meeting of June. 28. 1682 Hooke finished reading a discourse, which he had begun at the previous meeting.

Those present objected that ‘this Discourse had tended to proue the soule mechanicall’. In response:
M[r]. Hooke answered that there was noe such thing hinted
or in the Least Intended It being only intended to shew
that the soule did forme for its own vse certaine corpore
all Ideas which It stored vp in the Repository or organ of
memory, and that by its power of being Immediately sensible
of those Ideas wheneuer it exerted its power for that end
It thereby became sensible of those Ideas formerly made
as if they were made at that present but w[th] this Differ
rence that the further they were remoued from the cen
ter or seat of its more Immediat momentary Resi=
dence the more faint were the Reflections or Reactions
from them, and that occasioned the notion of the Distance
of time.

It is not explicit from the minutes which discourse Hooke was reading here, although Birch concludes that this discourse represented three of the Cutlerian lectures, later published in his ‘Posthumous Works’, edited by Waller. Waller dates the ‘lectures of light’ to ‘April 1681 and thereafter’, and a passage of this tract in which he describes the memory as the ‘Repository of Ideas’. While noting that the sense play a part in interpreting the impressions delivered to this repository, Hooke notes that the most important part is the soul, which directs and guides these impressions: ‘for I conceive no idea can be really formed or stored up in this Repository without the Directive and Architectonical Powers of the Soul’ (PW, p. 140).

Hooke had also referred to the soul in his ‘General Scheme or Idea of the PRESENT STATE of Natural Philosophy. . .’ begun in the early 1660’s as part of his unfinished ‘Philosophical Algebra’, and which mixes a Baconian approach to experimental knowledge with mechanist ideas. Here, the concern of the usually practically-orientated Hooke with the soul becomes a little clearer: following Bacon, he notes that the senses on their own are insufficient to produce a true understanding of the workings of nature. Man must therefore assist his sense, beginning with a thorough interrogation of his own soul to find the prejudices to which he is subject and the conscious correction of them:
The best remedy against this inconvenience, is the finding out what Constitution ones self is, and to what either naturally or accidentally most inclin’d to believe, and accordingly by reasoning and comparing things together to consider what the things themselves hint, and what Intimation proceeds from ones own consciousness’.

Hooke’s idea of the soul could be compared to his conception of machines, therefore, but not in the sense of either as unchanging and operating like clockwork, rather both can be regarded as aids to understanding, to be examined and improved, and compared with the impressions given by other instruments.
Johannes Amos Comenius. Orbis sensualium picus. Nuremburg, c. 1658. Wellcome Trust image L0007596

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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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I’m transcribing the first half of the folio now, which is incredibly densely covered in tiny writing. It is taking a very long time…

Well, thats my moan over, lets move onto Hooke’s. Hooke usually refers to himself in the third person, adopting the formal style of the journal book that he is copying in this part of the folio. However, the section of notes taken in late 1668 and 1669 is annotated with several notes that express Hooke’s growing irritation with the Royal Society and his role within it. For example, on Feb. 11. he notes grumpily that ‘The Curator Absent a Comitte appointed for Expts. [which never did any thing] ‘.

In several places Hooke records what he sees as unreasonable obstructions to his theories. A cause of particular annoyance was the Society’s response to his attempt to prove that ‘a body once put into motion would move perpetually if it met w[th] noe resistance’, and that the decrease of motion was proportional to the resistance it met with. The first part of this argument would later be expressed in Newton’s first law: ‘An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force’. However, the Royal Society were unconvinced by Hooke’s arguments, as he notes, ‘insteed of hearing grounds & reason, experim[t] were always calld for. and all loaded with objections little to purpose]’.

This was particularly frustratring given that the perpetual motion of a body not acted on by force was not something that could be readily proved by experimentation. In his attempt to demonstrate this law, Hooke constructed first a simple experiment with two wooden balls. To demonstrate that resistance decreases motion, at the meeting of 12 November 1668, a trial of three balls, now known as a ‘Newton’s cradle’ was made:

‘either of the two extremes being Lett fall from a certaine height against the intermediat ball y[e] other extreme was impelled vpward to neer the same height that is the middle mouing very little of wch the Presid conceuid this the reason that the intermediat when struck by one of the Laterall found the Resistance of the other Laterall ball but this other Laterall met noe other resistance but that of y[e] air.’

A final complaint allows us to date the copying from the Journal Book to after 1672: next to his own proposition in October 1668 that rebounding did not arise from ’springy particles’ but from the amount of air contained within a body, Hooke notes ‘Wallis prsented this as his own. 1672′. Hooke was apparently particularly concerned with this period of his engagement with the Royal Society. In several places he makes notes to himself to cross-check entries copied from the Journal Book with entries in the Letter Book.

The best explanation for the copy and notes seems to be that the copies were intended to be incorporated in the record of his life’s achievements that Waller reported Hooke began in 1697. In the fragment copied by Waller, Hooke expresses his intention ‘to write the History of my own life, wherein I will comprize as many remarkable Passages, as I can now remember or collect out of suchg Memorials that I have kept in Writing or are in the registers of the ROYAL SOCIETY’.

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Today I’ve escaped from the depth of the Royal Society archive to the lofty heights of the British Library map room to look at a map made by James Rennell entitled ‘A map of Hindoostan or the Mogul Empire from the latest authorities’. The map was dedicated to Joseph Banks, who was President of the Royal Society at the time of its publication in 1788.

Rennell was first Surveyor-General of India appointed by the East India Company in 1767. Rennell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1781, around which time he also published two accounts of his mapping experiences in Bengal and the empire of the ‘great Mogul’. These make it clear that Rennell compiled his map using a wide range of informants, including Indian and British soldiers, missionaries, and local people as well as the tables compiled of districts under the Emperor Akbar, who ruled India for the last half of the sixteenth century and who had used them to levy taxes.

The map itself is a beautiful creation and tells us a lot about European conception of India at the time. Of course this is true for any attempt at cartographical representation; as Siddharth Varadarajan points out in his essay India Tertia and the mapping of the colonial imaginary ‘in the very act of rendering intelligible the world with lines and shapes on stone, parchment or vellum – is always and everywhere an attempt to fashion new social boundaries and domains from the arid reality of geography.’

Rennell’s map is particularly interesting from this perspective as it is positioned on the boundaries of ‘modern’ methods of map-making, including the method of triangulation developed by his contemporary William Topping, and the older reliance on a collation of previous authorities and local informants. The idea of shifting boundaries and regions of influence is also evident in the map: Rennell shows both the subas, the divisions used by the geographical tables of Akbar in 1598 and the new divisions labeled according to their current rulers. These overlapping boundaries are distinguished by different typeface giving the map an almost three-dimensional effect. The scale of the map also speaks of transition and borrowing; adegree is given in reference to ‘Geographic miles’, ‘British miles’, ‘Cosses of Hindoostan’, ‘Carnatic Cosses’ and ‘Pliny’s road map, reduced to horizontal distance’.

The map retains many of the blank spaces that were said to have inspired Conrad’s hero: a large area of the interior is marked ‘unexplored by Europeans’ and the Coast between Bombay (Mumbai) and Goa is dubbed ‘pirate coast’. The blank spaces are also strategic, however, and the exceptions often reveal the commercial interests of Rennell’s employers, the East India Company. For example most of Burma is blank apart from the painstaking depiction of the area of ‘teek (teak) forests’ in the south. Such forests were always of interest to the European merchants given rising concerns about provision of wood for shipping.

Rennell produced many other maps, including the one below which shows the currents and patterns of wind as an aid to the circumvention of Africa. Oceanography was another subject on which Rennell corresponded with the Royal Society, writing to Blagden to ask for further information about the gulf stream.

Rennell’s connection with the Royal Society followed from an interest of many of the members in cartography and a concern to produce accurate maps for seafarers. This had been evident since their involvement with incomplete the ‘English Atlas’ project of Moses Pitt between c. 1675 and 1683. As Banks wished when he presented Rennell with the Copley medal, the map of India went on to inspire other large-scale projects of this nature, including the mapping of England.

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Phosphorus, a highly reactive chemical element found in inorganic rocks, is essential to DNA and RNA and is now used for a variety of purposes, from toothpaste to explosives. Its earlier history provides a good example of where alchemy and science overlap. First discovered in the 1660’s, the Royal Society’s early correspondence and experiments regarding it betray a mixture of spiritual and practical interest, as well as some confusion over what should properly be classed as phosphorus. A from Henry Oldenburg to Marcello Malpighi in 1677 describes the German chemist Balduin sending specimens of phosphorus to both the King Charles II and the Royal Society. Oldenburg notes that this stone (shown by later historians to have been calcium nitrate) ‘absorbs the light of the sun or a lamp that afterwards, in the dark, it radiates like incandescent iron or charcoal’. He also observes that this was a different substance from ‘Bologna stone’, a source of baryte, some species of which, like phosphorus, emit a glow on contact with oxygen. This property of the stone made it the focus of attention from alchemists, who identified it as the long sought after ‘philosopher’s stone’, capable of transforming metals into gold.

The interest of fellows such as Isaac Newton in alchemy is well known and references to alchemic myths such as the Table of Hermes litter the early records. The Royal Society also had more a practical aim in mind, however, in making trials on specimens of phosphorescent materials that they acquired: that of providing an alternative light source to candles and oil-lamps. They were encouraged in this effort by the reports of ‘perpetual noctiluca’ coming out of German at the time. Oldenburg’s letters to Adolf Balduin, who was made a fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of his phosphorus experiments urge him to divulge details of these claims. In February 1682, Hooke reported to the Society that these attempts were still in progress, noting that a Dr Eshalts ‘hoped he should suddainly haue the perpetuall noctiluca as to Enlighten a whole Room being able already to Read a large print by it’. Further correspondence with Eshalts during 1682 discusses the possibility that phosphorus might by made from serum, cows’ milk or human spittle as well as urine.

The Society performed their own experiments with the various phosphorescent materials they were able to obtain. Hooke tried in 1679 to make a type of phosphorus shine after being exposed to the moonlight but failed, even when using a burning glass. On 10 June 1691, the Society witnessed an experiment involving a ‘lapis smargadine’, literally an emerald-coloured stone. This was ground to a powder and placed on a copper plate which was heated, and ‘after the said Powder had been Showed vpon the plate in the shape of R.S. then the Room being Darkened by cloing the Shutters the powder on the plate began to appear white & shining, but [the] All the other parts of the plate did not at all shine for it was not soe great a heat as to make that red hot’. As part of his studies of respiration, Robert Boyle also made experiments with phosphorous wood in an ‘exhausted receiver’, showing that it required a chemical reaction with the air to keep burning (see Fulton’s 1960 article in Notes and Records).
The Philosophical Transactions of 1735 contains some similar experiments using phosphorus synthesized using the ‘acid salt’ (calcium phosphate) of urine as well as an attempt to use it in glass-making. Phosphorescent materials retained their magical allure for some time, and their association with other doctrines of alchemy. For example, a letter to Hans Sloane from a French correspondent dated 1737, stated that phosphorus was a good antidote to the poison of snakes. This idea is one that is constantly associated with bezoar stones, another concept central to alchemy.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that the generation of light, with its innately religious implications, continued to inspire mystical explanations. Likewise, the invention of electricity inspired new religious conceptions, even among those who worked most closely with it, as demonstrated by Noakes’ discussion of Varley’s spiritualism in January’s issue of Notes and Records.

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Last Sunday marked two hundred years since the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Like many men of their social class at the time, the members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had connections to the slave trade. As Govier has pointed out, the Royal Society invested their first substantial endowment, 1,300 pounds from the sale of Trinity College, in the Royal Africa and East India Companies, both of whom were involved in enslaving Africans for sale or work on their plantations. Several members of the Royal Society were involved with these companies: for example Paul Neile FRS was prominent in the RAC, while Jeremy Sambrooke and Sir John Lawrence are prominent in both the Council meetings of the early Royal Society and the correspondence of the East India Company, of whom both were Commissioners.

References to slavery in the early records of the Royal Society also reveal some degree of practical involvement in the mechanics of the trade. One example that occurs in the Hooke folio appears to refer to the making of ‘trade beads’ or ’slave bead’, glass beads used to trade with Africans in exchange for slaves. For example, at a meeting of April 22 1680 Robert Hooke presented his efforts to replicate a bead made of a blue stone said to be ‘much esteemed by those of Guiny’, which was testing along with some glass beads designed to counterfeit these beads. Apparently the fake bead was unconvincing, being reportly ‘[in] noe wise soe beautyfull & cleer of colour as that of Guiney’. An experiment of heating the bead in the flame also proved the superiority of the real stone, while it ‘could not be melted but it flawed & crackd like a Stone. the counterfeit ones melted very easily.’ Hooke promised to make a more convincing replica of the stone.

Some of the implications of slavery were a cause for concern for the deeply religious mathematician, Robert Boyle, as papers in his collection reveal. A copy in the Boyle Papers (Vol. 4 f. 118) of a draft Act of Parliament proposed in 1670 notes that the principle that a Christian should not be enslaved by another men of the faith has led to planters and owners of slaves actively discouraging the conversion of slaves for fear of losing their property and investment. The proposed solution was not the abolition of slavery, however, but the provision that the baptism of slaves would not affect the ’service’ due from them to their ‘former masters’. Proposals (f. 127-8) that seem to have been drafted by Boyle himself the same year list two proposal, which may have been regarded as alternatives, as their provisions are otherwise contradictory. The first allows for the freeing of a Christian slave but not the offspring of this slave while the second proposes rights for a Christian slave, including the ownership of goods and the right to seek legal redress against mistreatment by a master. The final document (f. 144) refering to slavery in this collection of papers is a copy of a letter of the East India Company to their colony at St Helena dated 9 December 1670. This orders that Christian slave who are able to demonstrate their knowledge of the faith should remain slaves for seven years, after which they should become free planters. There does not seem to be any evidence that this command, remarkably enlightened for its time, was followed and slavery continued to be a mainstay of the income Britain received from its plantations for over a century.

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Today David Miliband announced the UK’s new climate change bill, getting the message across with this video on YouTube. Climate change has become a matter of increasingly concern, especially after last month’s report that global warming could involve a rise in temperatures of around 4 degrees by the end of the century, with chaotic consequences. The Royal Society has been involved with the investigation into climate change: a study launched in January will focus in particular on the effects of ground-level ozone, one of the greenhouse gasses likely to influence warming.

Although most of the opposition to the view that human activity is responsible for climate change has now dissipated, studying the interaction between the properties of the air and the weather has long been hotly debated. In the seventeenth century the concept of air having a changeable gaseous nature rather than representing a static element was a new and controversial idea. The existence of some exhaustible property of air could be proven by Robert Hooke’s experiments with the now familiar experiment using a candle flame inside a jar. He repeated this using a chick and then himself, who fortunately both remained ‘very lively’. The possibilities afforded by this new understanding of air were also demonstrated in Boyle’s famous airpump, described in his New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects.

Not everyone was convinced immediately: Thomas Hobbes was famously critical of the credibility of Boyle’s experimental proofs. Many also doubted the validity of the experiments that the Royal Society performed to test air pressure using barometers and to compare the weights of various substances in air and water.

A page of the Hooke folio that does not seem to have survived elsewhere, probably dating from 1678, defends the various experiments against an attack on them as ‘triuiall and impertinent tricks’ by those who think themselves ‘masters of all knowledge a priori and by Reuelation and dispise[d] such as is acquired by experimental inquiry’. He goes on to argue that, concerning air:

An exact and thorough knowledge of that is of more concerne
to mankind then all the other physicall knowledg in the world. for
it is by that we continually subsist & wthout it we cannot liue one
tenth part of an hower. tis from that proceeds the causes of Infi=
nite of Diseases, and It affordes as many Remedys for those Distem
pers…that is the cause sine
qua non of all vegetables and animalls vpon the Land and it Influences euen
the fish in the sea. Infinite and vnspeakable are the vses of it to the husband
man the merchant the tradesman the mechanick &c and that age will be
Deseruedly famous that perfects the theory of it.

Hooke’s argument apparently gained acceptance among the Royal Society, who continued to investigate the properties of the air and their effects on the atmosphere. As a recent article in Amix notes, Nehemiah Grew came up with an interesting if incorrect theory that attributed barometric variations to the changing concentrations of saline bodies in the air, that affected atmospheric pressure. By the time of the Great Trigonometrical survey in India, observers were directed to record the chemical composition of the air.

Despite the innovations of John Evelyn in predicting the consequences of man’s interference with the environment in his discourse on forest trees, the impact of man on the composition of the air would only become significant after the industrial revolution and not fully appreciated until long after that. Furthermore, the age which Hooke envisages in which the understanding of the air and our interaction with it is perfected still seems far distant.

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In November 1681, the folio records that ‘Mr. Hooke Produced A new sort of Instrument for Describing the Rhombs or spirall lines vpon the Planisphericall projection on the pole of the world and shewed how the same would easily Describe all manner of Proportionall spiralls whether Greater or Lesse whether wider or narrower. And mentioned also what vse it might be for nauigation and sea charts.’ A few months later, Hooke produced a globe about a foot in diameter fitted with this instrument, and claimed that he could ‘thereby both Geometrically and mechanically Draw all the Rhumb lines vpon it most exactly’. A ‘rhumb line’, although sometimes used to indicate a straight line between two points on a Mercator chart, seems here to have its modern meaning of a curve that crosses each meridian at the same angle and the spirals Hooke refers to describe the way in which a rhumb spirals towards one of the poles.

The instrument designed by Hooke apparently had numerous applications: this is probably what he used in June that year to demonstrate the truth of Archimedes’ ancient theory on spirals, namely that ‘If a straight line drawn in a plane revolves uniformly any number of times about a fixed extremity until it returns to its original position, and if, at the same time as the line revolves, a point moves uniformly along the straight line beginning at the fixed extremity, the point will describe a spiral in the plane.’

Hooke later used the instrument in other ways, attaching it to a compass in order to describe a parabola. This apparently met with some opposition: at a meeting of 15 February 1682, it was noted that Flamstead had ‘cavilled against’ Hooke’s method, ‘affirming it to be fals’. On the repeated demonstration of the working of the instrument, however, the Society agreed that it was ‘true and certain and the best way yet known of describing that curve’. The final reference is in March 1682 and refers to the use of the instrument to describe an ellipse. By this entry Waller has noted ‘Quere Mr Hunt what this was and how performed’. Apparently, then the instrument and its method of use had been lost by the time Waller acquired Hooke’s papers in 1708. Richard Waller, a strong supporter of Hooke’s claims to priority had also made annotations against Hooke’s manuscripts about clocks or watches in Trinity College Cambridge – perhaps believing that they contained the solution to the long-term problem of longitude. He may, therefore, have also believed that this lost instrument was a significant piece of equipment in Hooke’s claim to have invented a new method of planispherical projection to be used in mapping.

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Acupuncture has been practiced in China, Japan and Korea for centuries and along with other ‘traditional’ or ‘complementary’ therapies remains a controversial topic in Western medicine. In the Hooke folio, an account of a meeting on the 18 January 1682 records the Royal Society discussing a letter from a Wilhem Ten Rhyne, from the factory of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) which asks that his manuscript on the use of acupuncture in Japan be published in English. The letter also describes the use of artemisia vulgaris, commonly known as mugwort, a herb used traditionally in Europe and America. In Oriental medicine it is known as moxa and is used in combination with acupuncture to stimulation circulation. The use of moxa to cure gout had also been discussed in a meeting of 1st August 1678, leading to a wider discussion about the effects of heat on the human body. This led to the observation that, like Chinese and Japanese doctors, Galen had paid more attention to the pulses in various parts of the body than was usual among surgeons of the day.

The Royal Society continued to debate the benefits of both moxa and acupuncture: a letter of 1692 from Wilhelm Ten Rhyne answers a list of queries about the specific uses of the techniques in Japan. These remedies had also been noted by Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716) in his ‘History of Japan, giving an account of the ancient and present state and government of that empire. . .To which is added, part of a journal of a voyage to Japan, made by the English in the year 1673’. Kaempfer’s manuscript was not published for almost a century acquired by the botanist and President of the Royal Society Hans Sloane who saw to the translation of the work by Johann Caspar Scheuchzer and its publication in 1727.

The benefits of ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ medicines are still hotly debated. While some claim that acupuncture essentially has a placebo effect, other research has suggested more tangible medical effects, most recently in treating Parkinson’s disease. The effects of artemisia vulgaris are a matter of continuing debate, some studies (for example the study of Cardini and Weixin published in JAMA in 1998) suggest it can assist in breach births by promoting fetal activity. A recent Royal Society policy paper on the issue stresses the importance of large scale randomised control trials in exploring the effects of types of therapies.

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