ABSTRACT
The birth of scientific academies in seventeenth-century Europe was part of the process of transition toward a new culture. Aristotelian science and the old methodology that assumed the existence of universal truths by which the processes of nature could be explained had come under persistent questioning. The truth, no longer a given, was coming to be thought of as capable of being continually transformed, revised, and corrected. Descriptions and explanations of natural phenomena emerged from novel researches and were communicated and popularized in order to be discussed and verified. This new and different mode in the investigation of nature constituted a revision in the practice of natural philosophy. The result was that, during the seventeenth century, a growing exchange of information created extraordinary networks, thanks to which there was a continual discourse between natural philosophers and interested amateurs, enthusiasts and politicians, and laymen and clerics throughout Europe.
