ABSTRACT
The word ‘scientist’ was not in existence during the eighteenth century. This term, which was disliked by many (Faraday eschewed its use), did not appear in the literature until the mid-nineteenth century. ‘We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science. I should incline to call him a scientist’, wrote William Whewell (1794-1866) in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time, (London, 1840). The scientist de facto had appeared some two centuries earlier. Robert Hooke (1635-1703) published his great work Micrographia in London during 1665, and with its wide-ranging discourse and its vivid portrayals of microscopic structures it can be seen as the first science book we would recognize in today’s terms.
