ABSTRACT
THE two preceding chapters have shown something of the extent to which many British scientists and scientific enthusiasts became interested in the investigation of the sea during the seventeenth century. Few, however, produced any very sustained account of their ideas and observations, details of which are to be found diffused among minutes, letters and discussions of sometimes totally unrelated subjects, often published long after they were written and in some cases not at all. Only those articles which found their way into the Philosophical Transactions were safe from obscurity both then and since, and it is by taking these alone into consideration that more recent writers have sometimes given a rather unbalanced view of the development of marine science in that age. The only writer to do literary justice at the time to the ideas which were then being put forward was Boyle whose essays on the sea must have been responsible to a great extent for shaping concepts about the sea held in the eighteenth century.
