Exploring our archives

Robert Knox was a close correspondent of the Royal Society, and a particularly close friend of Robert Hooke. His ‘Historical Relation of Ceylon’, published under the auspices of the Royal Society and the East India Company in 1681 provides an in-depth commentary on the social and political life of the Kingdom of Kandy in the period. Looking at a manuscript in the British Library, I discovered that in the same year his ‘Relation’ was published, Knox had begun another account of a journey to Tonqueen (Vietnam), where the East India Company were attempting to establish a factory (trading post) at the time. Unfortunately, the narrative breaks off before Knox reached his destination. Nevertheless, he does give some interesting descriptions of two islands in Cape Verde, an archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean off the West coast of Africa. The archipelago was unpopulated until its discovery by Portuguese sailors in the late fifteenth century, after which it became a sugar cane plantation and transit point in the Atlantic slave trade, remaining a colony until 1975, when it became the current Republic of Cape Verde. I’ve marked the location of the islands Knox mentions on a map here. Knox arrived in the ‘Isle of May’, Maio, on the 28 October 1681. His description concentrates on the plants that he recognises from Sri Lanka, which he details, speculating that the difference in longitude makes less difference to the climate, and hence the types of plant species that flourish, than the latitude. On leaving Maio, Knox sailed to the neighbouring island of ‘St Iago’, Santiagu, where he gives a description of the city and villages, also noting that although they referred to themselves as Portuguese and followed the religion and accepted the monarch of that country, the majority of inhabitants seemed to have come from Guinea. Again, Knox makes comparisons between the flora of the island and that of Ceylon, perhaps scouting for potential sites for the East India Company, he also comments on the scarcity of wood and the growing of cotton on the island and the possibilities affored by the iron stone he observes. He records that the journey to ‘Bantam’, Banten, took around six months, noting with approval that a watermelon he had acquired in Santiagu retained its freshness all the way. Banten, a province of Java where the East India Company had a factory, was a natural transit point for Knox’s final destination, ‘Tonqueen’, Vietnam, but it is at this point that the manuscript breaks off.

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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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On a recent visit to the excellent Boerhaave Museum in Leiden I noticed several of the Royal Society’s members represented among its collection. For example, on display was a copy of John Flamsteed’s beautiful Atlas coelestis, published posthumously in 1729 by his wife and amanuensis Margaret. Most prominent, however, was the work of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek of Delft, who is credited, along with Robert Hooke with the discovery of micro-organisms, a process which, as Jenni noted in her earlier post, can be traced more clearly using the Hooke folio. Leeuwenhoek was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1680 and clearly relished this recognition of his achievements: a 1686 portrait by J. Verkolje shows the former shopkeeper leaning proudly on a copy of the Society’s charter. One of Leeuwenhoek’s letters, published in the Philosophical Transactions of 1708/9, discusses the circulation of blood in fishes, a topic on which he had first corresponded with the Society in 1688. His observations and sketches decisively proved the theory that had been first advanced by William Harvey in 1628. Leeuwenhoek’s finding was illustrated by an incredibly detailed drawing of the circulation in the tail of a tadpole in the Boerhaave Museum.

Given the growing acceptance in this period that the blood did flow around the body, two important topic of discussion for the Society arose: namely, was how this was achieved and what purpose it served. Hooke tried to demonstrate in a series of experiments of 1669 that the circulation of the blood was caused by the beating of the heart. During the next year, discussion of the circulation of the blood in animals prompted some comparisons with the ongoing microscopical observations of the pores in plants, some being described as shaped like tiny drawers or ‘letter boxes’. The Society discussed whether a similar system to the circulation of the blood operated with the movement of the sap in plants and trees, providing their nourishment from the roots, or whether ‘ambient air’ was responsible for sustaining the plant. These speculations may have encouraged the curator of plants, Grew, in his 1675 publication on the ‘Comparative anatomy of trunks’.

Some interesting ideas about the relationship of air to the circulation of the blood were also put forward by Hooke at a meeting of 1672, when during a discussion of the purpose of respiration he argued ‘that by the air something essentiall to life might be conveyed into the blood, and something that was noysome to it be discharged back into the air’. He suggested that in order to discover whether ‘there are not Valves in the arterys, by which the air may passe into the parts of the Blood’ a representation could be made by injecting wax into the arteries.

Both the discussion of valves and the suggestion of injecting wax to produce accurate anatomical models echo the work of a Dutch contemporary of Leeuwenhoek’s based in Leiden. Jan Swammerdam was a pioneer in both microscopy and anatomy and had, also in 1672, presented the Society with a uterus filled with wax so as to show its anatomical structure more clearly. Swammerdam and Leeuwenhoek both observed red blood cells, the latter reporting the presence of ‘globules’ in his microscopical observations. It would be some time before these ‘globules’ could be decisively connected with Hooke’s conjectures about the purpose of the blood’s circulation through the lungs. However, the circulation of ideas between London and Leiden, which also included De Graaf and Constantin Huygens - both of whom helped Leeuwenhoek in his translation of his works and letters - would prove influential in advancing the understanding of the mechanism and purpose of the circulation of the blood.

Image: L0013035 Credit: Wellcome Library, London Photomontage From: Arcana naturae, ope & beneficio exquistissimorum microscopiorum detecta By: Leeuwenhoek, Anthony van Published: C. Boutesteyn Leyden 1708 3 figures Collection: Rare Books Full Bibliographic Record Link to Wellcome Library Catalogue

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