ABSTRACT
In considering the plate’s context, we need to go back to the beginnings of the Royal Society itself. It is easy to take the society’s foundation in 1660 for granted as a natural corollary of the growing esteem for science in mid-seventeenth-century England, and it is certainly true that science had thrived during the Interregnum and that it continued to fl ourish in more or less formal milieux thereafter. 1 It is equally true that a galaxy of famous names was associated with the society throughout the late seventeenth century, including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, William Petty, Christopher Wren, John Flamsteed, Isaac Newton and many others. But the inauguration of the Royal Society was signifi cant because it refl ected a view that the advancement of science would benefi t from its being represented by a public institution – in other words, from its being ‘established’, to which end the infant body was given an elaborate constitutional structure involving statutes and a charter (which was replaced by a revised one within a year of being issued). Indeed, the society represented a new type of public body, the prototype of all the voluntary institutions devoted to learned ends that have been founded ever since. 2
Yet, insofar as its structure and functions lacked precedent, the corollary was that the society’s early years saw a prolonged period of experimentation, as its founders discovered just what it was feasible for such a body to achieve, and what it was not. 3 At the outset, the society had breathtaking ambitions for the scale and comprehensiveness of the reform of knowledge about the natural world that, inspired by Bacon, it hoped to achieve. Moreover it was initially intended that these plans would be realised by corporate activity at its meetings: ‘it was to be a kind of once-a-week Rockefeller Institute’, as Robert G. Frank tellingly put it in a pioneering study. 4 Yet such aspirations proved to be over-ambitious or impractical. Increasingly, the society’s experimental programme became dependent on the heroic fi gure of its Curator of Experiments, Robert Hooke, appointed to the post in 1662, who will bulk large in this study. 5 Meanwhile its correspondence was the responsibility of the fi rst Secretary, Henry Oldenburg, who proved assiduous in keeping
in touch with scientifi c enthusiasts at home and abroad. 6 By such means the society gradually evolved into a type of body that had not at fi rst been entirely anticipated, in which its predominant role was less in the actual performance of science than in the provision of a clearing house for ideas about all aspects of the natural world and an agency for evaluating, accrediting and disseminating them – functions in which it was to prove remarkably effective.
