ABSTRACT
Robert Boyle, as a leading figure in the Royal Society, was eager to use his institutional standing to assist in gathering together comparative and miscellaneous information from around the world concerning social and natural matters of fact to contribute to his, and the Society's, Baconian project. The use of standardised questionnaires had quickly become a usual practice with the Society; another early example is John Wilkins's attempt to test his own theory of the tides by similar means, to coordinate varying tide-times in differing locations. These questionnaires were typically sent out to commercial functionaries of various kinds located in distant colonial trading posts. The ambition behind them, however, reveals a desire to create useful generalisations concerning natural and social phenomena that would assist the very enterprises of the colonial trading companies whose employees were targets of the questionnaires. Knowing more about the natural resources of various lands could assist trading companies themselves, and indirectly the Crown.
