ABSTRACT
A brief extract of a letter from William Derham mentions people quite far inland in Lewes and Portsmouth tasting salt on their grapes in the garden; a longer letter from Anthony van Lauwenhoek relates the details of an experiment, conducted at his home, to assess the movement of salt water on the wind. Considering the carefully-positioned extracts from Philosophical Transactions in this light, it is worth re-examining Derham’s letter which begins The Storm. The Storm, along with his earlier Essay upon Projects, is often cited by critics whose portrait of Daniel Defoe as quintessentially modern and progressive is evidenced by his calls for social reform and a writing style seemingly closer to investigative journalism or reportage. Similarly, the extent to which Defoe can be seen to take up the Royal Society’s ‘project’ of measuring nature empirically in The Storm needs to be juxtaposed with a clear sense of how this author understood the role of divine agency in the natural world.
