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The Nature of the Early Royal Society Part II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

K. Theodore Hoppen
K. Theodore Hoppen
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull HU6 7RX.
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Extract

The original fellow of the Royal Society best known for his concern for the Hermetic tradition is Elias Ashmole, who was associated with the society as early as 1661 and who in 1664 was appointed a member of its committee ‘for collecting all the phenomena of nature hitherto observed, and all experiments made and recorded’, that typically Baconian attempt to clear the decks for ‘scientific’ action. And it was Ashmole's munificence that was instrumental in establishing the first chemical laboratory at any British university, namely that at Oxford set up in the original Ashmolean Building in 1683.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , November 1976 , pp. 243 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1976

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References

REFERENCES

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88Birch, , Royal Society, op. cit. (6), i. 68, 82, 215–18, 241, 268–9, 406. In July 1663 he presented an account which opened with the words ‘Paracelsus saith’ and concluded with a quotation from Helmont.Google Scholar
89 See Hall, A. R.'s introduction to the Johnson Corporation reprint of Birch's Royal Society (4 vols., New York and London, 1968), i. xix. Of the 115 ‘original’ fellows of May 1663, no fewer than 24 were physicians;Google Scholar
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109Plot, , Natural history of Stafford-shire, op. cit. (107), pp. 9–13, 449, and 188. A large part of Chapter 8, ‘Of men and women’, is devoted to ‘monsters’, of various kinds. In 1683 Plot presented to the society's museum ‘an earth found under fairy-rings’;Google Scholar
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120 Printed in full in Gunther, , Early science in Oxford, op. cit. (103), iv. 130–2.Google Scholar
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122Birch, , Royal Society, op. cit. (6), iv. 434. Plot's interest in ‘magic’ of various kinds, as evidenced in his public writings, was hardly a secret either. Nor did he hesitate to entertain such concerns at the Royal Society, as when, in 1683, he showed the members ‘a paper with Arabic letters and some strange characters, being a spell found wrapt in the hair of the Guinea Negros’. See also Bodleian Library MS. Rawlinson K 35, f. 170a—a paper in Plot's hand concerning an apparition in 1627 foretelling the death of the then Duke of Buckingham.Google Scholar
123Blomberg, W. N., An account of the life and times of Edmund Dickinson M.D. (London, 1737), p. 16. In fact, this book is largely a (useful) summary of Dickenson's writings.Google Scholar
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