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Snake venom is still a poison that is hard to combat and presents a real public health problem in tropical countries. Treatments are still often sought in naturally-occurring antidotes, as the focus of a recent book on the antivenomous properties of plants reveals. Snake venom, like other poisons, can also have medicinal properties. The early Royal Society collected accounts of snakes, samples of venom, and possible cures. One widely debated idea was that venom could be combated by the use of stones found in the heads of snakes. These stones were highly valued across the Indian Ocean and had begun to be brought back into Europe in the 1650’s by Jesuit missionaries [1].

One of the places where the Hooke folio provides a slightly different account to that of the Journal Book concerns these snake stones. The story begins with the minutes for the meeting of 20 May - a date on which the Journal Book records that the Society ‘did not sit’. The folio records that the stone had been brought to the East India Company to the Royal Society, who had received it from the King of Bantam as a present and were ‘unsure of its virtues’. One of the agents, a Mr Hublon, referred the Society to a translation of a Portuguese work printed in 1582. mentioning the medicinal properties of a stone found in the head of a snake, or ‘Piedra de Cobra de Mombasa’, which was thought to cure various ailments. Interestingly, although the Journal Book minutes for 27 May 1680, a date missing from the folio, mentions ‘Hublon’s stone’, it does not mention that the Company agents were present at the meeting, or refer to the Portuguese book. Dr Tison is recorded as giving an account that the dogs he had attempted to poison with snake venom did not become ill in the first place and that he had therefore abandoned the experiment - although he then added that he had tried one such stone on the hand of an unfortunate servant who had been bitten by a viper (it is not clear whether he encouraged the viper in this case!) This is in contrast to the folio which records in the draft reply to the Company - one of the sheets in the folio not in Hooke’s hand - that the two dogs given venom and nux vomica died despite the administration of the antidote, a passage that is missing from the copy of the letter in the Journal Book.
The Society’s draft reply to the EIC describes the use of the stone, found in ‘the province of Zanguobar (used to refer to the East Coast of Tanzania) in Africa’ and used there as a treatment for colic, in childbirth and against depression and in Europe and the East Indies as an antidote to poison. The description of how to prepare a medicine from the stone, ‘to rub it on a hard smooth stone till a cream comes of it’, is given, apparently derived from the use in Africa or the East Indies. The letter then contains an assurance that Francesco Redi ‘a virtuoso of Ferdinand grand Duke of Florence’ had not found the stone useful. The report of the Society’s own experiments, at first inserted in the middle of the letter, have been crossed out and moved to a tentative appendage in the draft in the Hooke folio, and omitted completely from the copy in the Journal Book. As well as providing an interesting example of the divergence between the folio and the official records, this incident illustrates firstly just how important it was to the East India Company to discover the medical properties of new vegetable, mineral and even animal substances. The agents of the Company were at the mercy of newly encountered diseases. European medicines were often powerless to combat these problems or did not survive the long journey to their destination. Those medicines that were found to be effective, such as the anti-malarial, ‘Jesuits’ bark’, were also a potential source of revenue for the Company. Secondly, it shows that the Royal Society was already becoming seen by this stage as a port of call for queries involving unfamiliar objects. Finally it shows why the Society often had to rely on the testimony of their network of contacts rather than their own experiments - although the records are unclear the attempt to poison the dogs seems to have failed in some way and such poison, as well as instructions on how to administer it, would have been scarce and the medical effects would have been difficult to gage - depressed dogs being still more scarce
Ironically, despite the complete failure of their own experiments, the reference to Redi may serve to reassert the Royal Society’s commitment to experimentation. Snakestones had become a mainstay in the debate between two rival natural philosophers in Italy: Athanasius Kirchner and Francesco Redi. While Kirchner was an advocate of the Aristolean philosophy and had close ties to the papacy and the College Romano, Redi, an fearsome opponent of Aristotle, was his rival at the Medici court. While Kirchner used a single trial to confirm, as he claimed, the reports of the missionaries of the stone effecting miraculous cures, Redi performed hundreds of experiments to support his claims that the stones were not effective against poison. The verdict of the Royal Society here therefore shows a more theoretical than practical commitment to experimentation. This did not diminish their interest in various types of poisons and their antidotes, however, the search for toxins derived from plant and animal matter continues throughout the early records of the Society [2].

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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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