ABSTRACT
The gregarious natural philosopher Robert Hooke (1635-1703) kept a private journal for two extended periods (1672-83, 1688-93), the earlier years preserved in a folio MS now at the Guildhall, the later in a tiny pocket-book in the Sloane collection. Heavily abbreviated, these terse jottings record not only Hooke’s activities as a central figure in the early Royal Society but also his career as City Surveyor, his private intrigues, his keen interest in the London book trade, and his daily meetings in the coffee shops with his circle of friends, themselves typically fellows of the Royal Society.1 In particular, the laconic accounts of conversations held in the coffee shop reveal the breadth of Hooke’s interests, and this essay addresses one such interest in particular: the Hooke circle and the book of Genesis, more precisely the Genesis accounts of the creation of the world and of man, of man’s fall, and of the flood.
