Self-Scrutiny and the Study of Nature: Robert Hooke's Diary as Natural History

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotte Mulligan
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
After Hours ◽  
College Now ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

Robert Hooke's intellectual life was steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of natural philosophy and the formulation of an appropriate method for studying nature, His daily life, however, was seemingly fragmented—an energetic rush in and around the city of London, with him acting now as curator (and later secretary) of the Royal Society, now as Cutlerian Lecturer in the History of Nature and Art, now as Geometry Professor at Gresham College, now as architect and surveyor of postfire London, and forever as a member of a number of intersecting social, intellectual, and professional circles that made up London's coffeehouse culture. Such a range of activities was perhaps wider than that of many of his contemporaries, though other diarists, most notably Samuel Pepys, recorded similarly crammed lives. Yet despite the apparently unsystematic nature of his daily round he was, also like Pepys, a methodical man who hated to waste time, and for long periods he kept a diary that helped him account for how he spent it.I argue here that his diary keeping was an integral part of his scientific vision reflecting the epistemological and methodological practices that guided him as a student of nature. The diary should be read, I propose, not as an “after-hours” incidental activity removed from his professional and intellectual life; both its form and its content suggest that he chose to record a self that was as subject to scientific scrutiny as the rest of nature and that he thought that such a record could be applied to producing, in the end, a fully objective “history” with himself as the datum.

Francis Bacon and the Origins of Christian Virtuosity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Mind

Although the vocation of Christian virtuoso was invented and named by Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon provided the archtype. A Christian virtuoso is an experimental natural philosopher who professes Christianity, who endeavors to unite empiricism and supernatural belief in an intellectual life. In his program for the renewal of the learning Bacon prescribed that the empirical study of nature be the basis of all the sciences, including not only the study of physical things, but of human society, and literature. He insisted that natural causes only be used to explain natural events and proposed not to mix theology with natural philosophy. This became a rule of the Royal Society of London, of which Boyle was a principal founder. Bacon’s rule also had a theological use, to preserve the purity and the divine authority of revelation. In the mind of the Christian virtuoso, nature and divine revelation were separate but complementary sources of truth.

scholarly journals VI. A botanical invitation forward an history of the plants of Swisserland; by Dr. John Jacob Scheuchzer, M. D. F. R. S. Sent to Sir Hans Sloane, Bart. Pr. R. S. To be communicated to the Royal Society. Translated by Mr. Zollman, F. R. S

1731 ◽  
Vol 37 (421) ◽  
pp. 219-220
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
History Of

It is not my Intention to enter into a long Detail of what I have hitherto performed in Natural History, both in general, and that of Swisserland in particular, left I might seem guilty of Vanity even in merely relating it.

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

The City of London Police Museum and Exhibition

1970 ◽  
Vol 43 (7) ◽  
pp. 342-347
Author(s):  
Donald Rumbelow
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
History Of ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

Constable Rumbelow joined the City of London Police in 1963. His play “Lobsters and Bowmen” was produced in 1966 and his first book, a social history of police and crime in the city, is to be published this year by Macmillans. His next book will be about the Siege of Sidney Street.

scholarly journals Robert Alexander Frazer, 1891-1959

1961 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 75-84 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Private Life ◽  
London School ◽  
The Family ◽  
Four Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

Robert Alexander Frazer was born in the City of London on 5 February 1891. His father, Robert Watson Frazer, LL.B., had retired from the Madras Civil Service and had become Principal Librarian and Secretary of the London Institution at Finsbury Circus, whence in the following two decades he produced four books on India and its history, of which perhaps the best known was one published in the ‘Story of the Nations’ Series by Fisher Unwin, Ltd., in 1895. The family lived at the Institution and Robert was born there. Young Frazer proceeded in due course to the City of London School where he did remarkably well and won several scholarships and medals. By the time he was eighteen years of age, the City Corporation, desiring to commemorate the distinction just gained by Mr H. H. Asquith, a former pupil of the school, on his appointment as Prime Minister, founded the Asquith Scholarship of £100 per annum tenable for four years at Cambridge. It thus came about that at the school prize-giving in 1909 the Lord Mayor announced that the new Asquith Scholarship had been conferred on Frazer, who was so enabled to proceed to Pembroke College, Cambridge, that autumn. Frazer, in the course of his subsequent career, had two other formal links with London. In 1911 he was admitted to the Freedom of London in the Mayoralty of Sir Thomas Crosby, having been an Apprentice of T. M. Wood, ‘Citizen and Gardener of London’; and in 1930 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science by the University of London. The former may or may not have been a pointer to his subsequent ability as a gardener in private life; the latter was certainly a well-deserved recognition of his scientific work at the time.

Political Science

2018 ◽  
pp. 104-133
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Core ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Late seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon’s experimental project. Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels use the conventions of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions, insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage, in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into civil society.

scholarly journals V. An account of books. I. An essay toward a natural history of the earth, and terrestrial bodies, especially minerals: As also of the sea, rivers, and springs. With an account of the universal deluge, and of the effects that it had upon the earth. By John Woodward, M. D. Professor of Physick in Gresham College, and Fellow of the Royal Society. Printed for Ric. Wilkin at the King's Head in St. Paul's Church-yard. 1695. Octavo. 2. An account of a paper, entituled, archibaldi pitcarnii, M. D. disser

1695 ◽  
Vol 19 (217) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Great Weight ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of

V. An account of books. I. An essay toward a natural history of the earth, and terrestrial bodies, especially minerals: As also of the sea, rivers, and springs. With an account of the universal deluge, and of the effects that it had upon the earth. By John Woodward, M. D. Professor of Physick in Gresham College, and Fellow of the Royal Society. Printed for Ric. Wilkin at the King's Head in St. Paul's Church-yard. 1695. Octavo. 2. An account of a paper, entituled, archibaldi pitcarnii, M. D. dissertatio de Febribus, &c. The Author of this Book having with great Industry, and no less Success, made Enquiry into many considerable Parts of Nature, hath thought fit here to set forth an Account of several of his Observations, and of certain Conclusions which he hath drawn from them, whereof many are indeed of great weight and moment, but all in a compendious manner, as intending this Discourse only as a Prœlude to one-much larger, and to comply with the Importunities of some Persons of Worth, who .requested a brief Account of these things from him, for their present Satisfaction, until his Affairs should permit the compleating of his Greater Work, which he promiseth, with a further Proof both of these, and of others not yet proposed.

Francis Vernon, the Early Royal Society and the First English Encounter with Ancient Greek Architecture

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 29-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Walker
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
English Language ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Initial Exposure ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Architecture ◽  
European Publication ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Francis Vernon (c. 1637-77) is not a particularly well-known figure in the history of British architecture, but perhaps he should be. In 1675 he became one of the first English people to have set foot in Athens and, the following year, published what was undisputedly the first account in the English language of the city and its architecture. Vernon was a member of the recently founded Royal Society and one of a group of English and French travellers who journeyed through central Greece and Turkey in the 1670s. He was murdered in Isfahan in early 1677. Vernon's account of the time he spent in Athens was published in the Society's journal, thePhilosophical Transactions, in 1676, and it included brief but illuminating descriptions of the Erechtheion, the Temple of Hephaestus and the Parthenon, the latter written over ten years before the bombing of the temple by a Venetian army in 1687. TheTransactionsoften contained both travel writing and antiquarian material and, in this respect, Vernon's account was typical of the journal's somewhat eclectic content in its early years. Significantly, Vernon's publication predated more famous accounts of Greece from the period, such as those written by his travelling companions Jacob Spon (who released hisVoyage d'ltalie, de Dalamatie, de Grèce et du Levantin France in 1678) and George Wheler, whoseA journey into Greecewas published in 1682. Unlike Vernon, both Spon and Wheler survived their journeys. The only European publication on Athens that preceded Vernon's was a French text of 1675 that would prove to be a fabrication. As this article will demonstrate, Vernon's initial exposure of this fabrication was one of the reasons why his account of the city became so important in English intellectual culture at the time.

scholarly journals Natural Knowledge, Inc.: the Royal Society as a metropolitan corporation

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-271
Author(s):  
NOAH MOXHAM
Keyword(s):  
Early Development ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Knowledge Communities ◽  
Knowledge Community ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Internal Organization ◽  
Limited Power ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development.

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