ABSTRACT
The unique source of ‘A Compendious Discourse’, an autograph manuscript, is the first item in London, Royal Society, and Boyle Papers. This is a modern guard-book, containing papers on a variety of subjects that had belonged to the natural philosopher Robert Boyle. After Boyle’s death, the manuscript seems to have passed into the possession of his executor, John Warr. It was among the Boyle papers subsequently collected by Henry Miles FRS and presented to the Royal Society in 1769 by Miles’s widow, Emma. The manuscript comprises twenty leaves, measuring about 310 × 200 mm. These appear to be wholly in Birchensha’s handwriting. Each pair of adjacent leaves, beginning with fols 3–4 and continuing to fols 1920, is formed of a sheet of paper folded once. Birchensha’s decision to divide the ‘Practicall Part’ and ‘Mathematicall Part’ into numbered chapters was evidently made at a late stage, after the text as a whole had been drafted.
