At some point during the last two years of his life, Robert Boyle dictated to his friend, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, some notes on major events and themes in his career. Some of the information he divulged in these memoranda has become quite widely known because Burnet used it in the funeral sermon for Boyle that he delivered a month after his death, at St Martin's in the Fields on 7 January 1692. In addition, these notes were cited several times by Thomas Birch in the ‘Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle’ that he prefixed to his edition of Boyle's collected works of 1744: he there describes his source as ‘Mr. Boyle's memorandums of his own life, dictated by himself to Bishop Burnet’.2 What has hitherto been virtually overlooked is that the manuscript of these notes, which is in Burnet's hand, survives among the Birch Papers in the British Library: it is this document—and particularly a substantial component of it which was publicized by neither Burnet nor Birch—that forms the starting point for this paper.

Over the last forty years several historians have drawn attention to aspects of the activities of lecturers on natural philosophy in Britain in the eighteenth century. Hans and others looked at the part these lecturers played in the development of education, particularly adult education. Musson and Robinson considered the possible connection between the work of the lecturers and the growth of industry, and Inkster and others have explored the relationship between lecturers and the institutions set up to support science, especially around 1800.4 More recently, Schaffer has pointed to the parallels between the performances of the lecturers on natural philosophy and other contemporary cultural activities. As a consequence of these studies we know much more about the work of the lecturers, its significance, and, to a lesser extent, their relationship to their audience.

Scientific textbooks are often said to deliver a stereotyped kind of knowledge, which conceals rather than reveals the real making of science. They may, however, alternatively be regarded as of peculiar interest for historians of science. An over-mechanical application of the Kuhnian concepts of ‘scientific revolution’ and ‘normal science’ can lead to the neglect of the internal dynamics of ‘normal science’. Scientific textbooks may provide a better understanding of the process of normalization in science.