ABSTRACT
As has already been noted, the content of ‘Physica Peregrinans’ would almost certainly predominantly have derived from the vivid and absorbing narratives to be found among Boyle’s workdiaries, particularly Workdiaries 21 and 36. It is hoped that readers’ appetites will have been whetted by the profuse quotations from these sources included in the text of Chapter 9, and that they will be inspired to go to https://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/wd/index.html" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">www.livesandletters.ac.uk/wd/index.html and browse this immense body of material for themselves. Here, it seems worth taking the opportunity to supplement the larger body of material available online by publishing for the first time some examples of the records that Boyle kept of conversations with visitors to exotic locations to which Chapter 9 was devoted; it seems almost certain that these, too, were destined for ‘Physica Peregrinans’. They survive scattered through the Boyle Papers, mostly falling into the category of material transcribed from workdiaries that are now lost which has been surveyed elsewhere. 1 All are in the hand of Robin Bacon, except for two – the one about the tarantula, which is in the hand of Thomas Smith, another amanuensis whom Boyle used extensively in his later years, and the very first of all: this is mostly in ‘hand C’, another hand found frequently in documents written in the 1680s, the author of which has not been identified by name, while the final paragraph is in the hand of Hugh Greg. 2
