Exploring our archives

Next month I’m taking the RMS ship to St Helena, following the route taken by several members of the Royal Society. This small Atlantic island was originally discovered in 1502-5 during Vasco da Gama’s journey to the East Indies and during the sixteenth century was visited (willingly and unwilling) by travelers as diverse as two teenage Japanese princes en route to visit the Pope and an unlucky follower of Afonso Albuqueque, who was marooned there after defecting to his enemy Prince Khan. It was also the site of what can be described as the first ever ’sci-fi’ novel, Francis Godwin’s 1638 ‘Man in the Moone’. The island passed between Dutch and English settlement before 1673, at which point the East India Company established their ‘government’ there. Edmund Halley visited in 1676 to determine the positions of stars in the northern hemisphere and to observe the transit of Mercury across the sun, for which purpose he built an observatory on the island (1). Halley’s trip to the island was also important for his observations of the magnetic declination of the earth, which would later form the basis of his atlases of the Atlantic and the world as well as making an important contribution to Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Perhaps frustrated by having his observations so frequently interrupted by poor weather, Halley also wrote an article about the ‘watery vapours’ on the island, a piece sometimes hailed as an early example of climate environmentalism (2). Halley was followed almost a century later by Dixon and Mason, sent to observe the 1761 transit.

As an important transit point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, St Helena was a site for experimentation with agricultural and manufacturing techniques drawn from both worlds: growing different types of rice and wheat as well as coffee, which is still produced on the island. Many of these experiments were drawn from Asia, which remained far ahead of Europe in terms of manufacturing techniques in the seventeenth century (the most obvious example being textiles). Having tried unsuccessfully to persuade some of the Indian inhabitants of Madras to visit and demonstrate the making of indigo, the Company was forced to rely on the experience of their servants of agricultural and manufacturing techniques used in the East and West Indies. The Governor Isaac Pyke was a frequent correspondent of the Society and published a piece in Philosophical Transactions entitled ‘The Making of Mortar at Madras’ (3), which details the technique and his efforts to reproduce it on St Helena. I recently found the manuscript copy of this paper among the manuscripts held in Senate House, along with Pyke’s ‘hydrostatick’ method of calculating the composition of metals. Weighing composite metals in water and air was another frequent obsession of the Society’s during the seventeenth century, the results of these experiments being painstakingly recorded in the Hooke folio. Pyke’s MS alerted me to the practical applications of the method; showing the composition, and thus relative values, of different types of gold and silver coins.
1) Alan Cook. ‘Edmond Halley and the Magnetic Field of the Earth’. Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 55 (3), 473–490 (2001)

2) Edmund Halley. ‘An Account of the Circulation of Watry Vapours of the Sea, and of the Cause of Springs. Philosophical Transactions, 192:17 (1694), 468-73.

3) Isaac Pyke. ‘The Method of Making the Best Mortar at Madras’. Philosophical Transactions, 37 (1731/1732), 231-235.

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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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The Hooke folio is now online and searchable at http://webapps.qmul.ac.uk/cell/Hooke/Hooke.html while the visually stunning ‘turning the pages’ can be found at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/library/HookeTTP/hooke_broadband.htm.

We’ll be continuing this blog, talking about new discoveries we make in the archives and their impact for science and society today. We will soon be joined by two new PhD students from the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters who will also be working on the archives of the early Royal Society. Introductory posts by Noah and Rebecca coming soon

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I’m constantly finding papers relating to the Royal Society outside of the Society’s archive. This week I’ve been looking at some of the letters of Thomas Smith FRS (1638-1710), which are kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A series of letters to his friend Edward Bernard, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, give some informal opinions about members of the Society which really bring them to life as characters. For example, after the death of Robert Boyle, Smith reminiscences about taking walks with his friend, and recalls the times when Boyle had asked Smith, the former Ambassador to Constantinople, ‘to give some accompt of the Turks, who hee called my parishioners’. In 1689, Smith also describes to Bernard a chance encounter with Robert Hooke, which demonstrates the closeness of the circles of ‘virtuosi’ of London and Oxford: bumping into Hooke by chance, Smith had asked about ‘the Malabar &c. character’, upon which subject Bernard had written to Boyle, Hooke ‘told me that Mr Boyle had spoken to him about the same curiosity, and putting his hand in his pocket, pulled out your letter which I had conveyed to Mr. B. on coming to town’. Other pen portraits Smith gives of early members are less flattering: for example, Halley’s pretensions to succeed Smith’s friend Edward Bernard as Professor of Astronomy at Oxford are mocked as presumptuous, although Halley is apparently regarded as preferable to Flamstead, who is dismissed as ‘a grievous Whig’. Smith’s letters also reveal some concern about the fortunes of the Society in its early days. For example, in 1677, he wrote ‘there will be methods found out of retrieving the glory of such an excellent institution, which some idle and malicious persons have lately given out was a sinking’.

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Japan is generally thought to have had few dealings with foreigners between the early late seventeenth- and mid-nineteenth centuries. The Dutch and Chinese were the only outsiders allowed to establish trading stations in the period and as these scrolls from the British Library show, their activities were closely monitored. The English East India Company tried twice to win equivalent privileges, both ending in failure. Robert Boyle, who acted as an adviser to the Company, seems to have been involved in gathering background information for at least one of these attempts. Vol. 39 consists mostly of copies from accounts of travel, like Purchas’ ‘Pilgrimages’ and of copies of directives concerning the Committee for Plantations of which Boyle and Evelyn were members. It also includes some notes on the various trade items that could be supplied to Asian countries. The list for Japan is particularly interesting. Like many of the others it goes into considerable detail about the colour and texture of cloth favoured there, but it then goes on to list ‘burning glasses, spectacles, perspective glasses and watches’ from European as items required in Japan. Although Chinese and Japanese glass making was advanced at an early stage, it has generally been assumed that this skill was not used in making eye glasses and no trade in them has previously been noted. The references to burning and perspective glasses suggests that, despite their isolation, the Japanese had some interest in European scientific equipment. Another clue that some kind of exchange was taking place can be found in Vol. 6 of the Record Book: Between 1683 and 4, Robert Hooke experimented with several types of instruments for weighing, making different types of balances and stilliards (also spelled ’stillyard’ and ’stiliyard’, according to the OED this refers to ‘a balance consisting of a lever with unequal arms that moves on a fulcrum; the article to be weighed is suspended from the shorter arm, and a counterpoise is caused to slide upon the longer arm until equilibrium is produced, its place on this arm (which is notched or graduated) showing the weight’). On January 23rd 1684, the Record Book (Vol. 6 f. 143-4) records Hooke experimenting with Japanese scales and weights ‘made and adjusted in that country with great care and curiosity’. Hooke describes the brass weights as bearing the seal of the Emperor and, although does not name the person who had brought him the weights, notes that ‘[t]hese (as I was informed by the person who brought them from the Indies) are by a severe penalty prohibited to be exported to any other place and are of great Value in the place itself’. Presumably from the same source, Hooke had acquired a Japanese stilliard ‘made upon the same principle as our Common Stilyards but with greater curiosity and for smaller weights than we generally use them’ with a beam of tapering ivory and the scale or disk suspended by a silk thread, which passed through a hole in the beam. The use of silk ‘bows’ rather than handles also made it easier to reposition the weight as needed and, Hooke concluded made ‘the whole instrument as exact for weighing silver as our Seals with severall weights and consequently less troublesome’. As a result of his examination of the Japanese stilliard, Hooke made another ‘of my own invention by which the weight of any Body might be found without the trouble of removing the weight which is necessary both in the Indian and in our common stilyard’. Hooke’s story about the Emperor’s guarding of the instruments bearing his seal alongside the evidence for European instruments entering Japan seems to have been part of a wider policy of monitoring developments among the Europeans while keeping them at a distance: an undated and unattributed folio among the Boyle papers in Vol. 39 gives an account, apparently from a Dutch factor there of a visit to the court to be reprimanded for interfering in the affairs of the Chinese factory, also based at Nagasaki. The Dutch were also warned that although their nation was now at peace with Portugal, that the factors should ‘keep a strict watch ouer ye Portugueez & ye Spainards yt if they should conscribe anything against Jappan, presently make it known to the Governor at Nagasaki, whereby we shall doe great service to the Imperial ma[jes]tie.’ The Dutch factory therefore seems to have been a channel for some exchange of information between Japan and Europe: the Royal Society’s questions for Japan (part of an early series of inquiries sent all over the world) were sent via the Hague. The answers, received in French from ‘MI’ are published in translation in Philosophical Transactions vol 24, no 293, p 1723 (PDF). M Peron and M del Boe are named as the recipients of another set of questions from Henry Oldenburg in 1671 and a further link was Wilhelm ten Rhine, a member of the Dutch factory.

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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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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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