ABSTRACT
In 1686 the ‘Royal Society, for the improvement of naturall knowledge by Experiment‘, received from one of its fellows, Isaac Newton, news that the manuscript of his ‘Principia’ was ready for the press. Alas, the society felt compelled to bow out of its commitment to have the book published at its own cost. Its funds had been depleted by the recent publication of a lavishly illustrated Historia piscium (‘History of Fishes’) by the late fellow Francis Willoughby. In the end the society’s clerk to see the Principia through the press, Edmond Halley, got the printing costs reimbursed, not in pounds sterling but in fish, or rather, in tomes filled with accounts of a large, thoughtfully categorized assortment of fishes. The story encapsulates in a nutshell the relative importance attached at the time to the predominantly mathematical and the fact-finding modes of nature-knowledge in Britain and (in somewhat lesser measure, given the Continental popularity of a third rival, Cartesianism) elsewhere in Europe as well.
Had anyone in the circle close to the Royal Society been asked, in the years before 1700, where the future of science lay, they would almost certainly have identified as its focus the compilations of data and systematic taxonomics that absorbed the interest of Sloane and his fellow physicians and natural historians. Even during the period of Newton’s presidency [1703–1727], …, the physics, astronomy and mathematics we associate with the birth of modern science today was a minor, specialist interest, regarded with a certain distaste because of the personal quarrels about priority and intellectual ownership these more abstract domains of inquiry seemed frequently to provoke. 230
