ABSTRACT
In the first year of the eighteenth century, fourteen years after the publication of the Principia, two years after the reorganization of the French Royal Academy of Sciences had brought Newton in as a Foreign Member, anyone looking back to review the scientific inheritance from the seventeenth century would have found it rich and varied. Neo-Cartesianism was the prevalent natural philos ophy, with Leibniz and Malebranche active and influential figures, and the lessons of Huygens still cogent. Largely as yet confined to Germany was an evolving tradition of chemical mysticism rooted back in Van Helmont and Paracelsus, represented by Johann Joachim Becher (1625-82), Johann Kuhckel (1630-1703) and Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734); in Germany too interest in medicine was particularly strong, while comparative anatomy had flourished under the aegis of the Academy in Paris, and in Holland, where Frederick Ruysch (1638-1731) was the active master. Astronomy was cultivated not only by Flamsteed (an enemy of Newton’s, now) at Greenwich, but at Paris where the Cassini family acquired the Observatory almost as an hereditary fief, and by many ‘amateur’ astronomers. In the mathematical sciences Leibniz, his associates and their pupils dominated the academic world from Padua to Groningen, and especially in the person of Pierre Varignon (1654-1722) were firmly established in the French Academy. It would have been a fair judgement on the previous fifty years to conclude that a great deal had been learned, not least in the descriptive sciences, and that pure and applied mathematics had made very swift advances indeed. But only to a relatively small number of Englishmen would it have appeared that the character of scientific work and thought had undergone any very radical change in that time; any European in 1701 discerning such a change would have attributed it to Huygens and Liebniz.
