“Into the Valley of Darkness”: Reflections on the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century

Reingold N. , “American indifference to basic research: A reappraisal”, in Daniels G. H. (ed.), Nineteenth-century American science (Evanston, 1972), 38–62, p. 43.

The approach intimated in this paper is being fully developed in a book on scientific organization in eighteenth and early nineteenth century England focusing on, but not exclusively concerned with, the Royal Society of London. This work includes an extensive prosopographical analysis of the 578 members of the Royal Society Council between 1750 and 1840.

For a survey of such work see Hunter Michael , Science and society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981).

Hunter Michael , The Royal Society and its fellows 1660–1700: The morphology of an early scientific institution (Chalfont St Giles, 1982).

Dear Peter , “Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and authority in the early Royal Society”, Isis, lxxvi (1985), 145–61; Shapin S. Schaffer S. , Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton, 1985). Of recent work on scientific institutions, McClellan J. E. III , Science reorganized: Scientific societies in the eighteenth century (New York, 1985) is, for all its value, typical of what I mean by the functionalist approach here.

Hall M. B. , All scientists now: The Royal Society in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1984); MacLeod Roy M. , “Whigs and savants: Reflections on the reform movement in the Royal Society, 1830–1848”, in Inkster I. Morrell J. (eds), Metropolis and province: Science in British culture 1780–1850 (London, 1983), 55–90; Miller D. P. , “‘Between hostile camps’: Sir Humphry Davy's presidency of the Royal Society of London, 1820–1827”, The British journal for the history of science, xvi (1983), 1–47.

Thackray A. W. , “Natural knowledge in cultural context: The Manchester model”, American historical review, lxxix (1974), 672–709; Inkster Morrell (eds), Metropolis and province.

Porter R. , “Science, provincial culture and public opinion in enlightenment England”, British journal of eighteenth-century studies, iii (1980), 20–46; Inkster I. , “The public lecture as an instrument of science education for adults — The case of Great Britain, c. 1750–1850”, Pedagogica historica, xx (1980), 80–107; Schaffer S. , “Natural philosophy and public spectacle in the eighteenth century”, History of science, xxi (1983), 1–43; Rousseau G. S. , “Science books and their readers in the eighteenth century”, in Rivers I. (ed.), Books and their readers in eighteenth-century England (Leicester, 1982), 197–255.

Lyons H. , The Royal Society 1660–1940: A history of its administration under its charters (Cambridge, 1944), chs 4 and 5; Stimson D. , Scientists and amateurs: A history of the Royal Society (New York, 1948), chs 8, 10; Weld C. R. , A history of the Royal Society (2 vols, London, 1848).

But see Crosland M. , “Explicit qualifications as a criterion for membership of the Royal Society: A historical review”, Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, xxxvii (1982–83), 167–87, and also M. C. Jacob, The cultural meaning of the scientific revolution (New York, 1988), 153–6.

Porter R. , “The enlightenment in England”, in Porter R. Teich M. (eds), The enlightenment in national context (Cambridge, 1981), 1–18.

Heilbron J. L. , Physics at the Royal Society during Newton's presidency (Los Angeles, 1983), 4. But interestingly, Heilbron partially resuscitates the presidency of Martin Folkes, which is usually seen (for example by Lyons, The Royal Society) as an antiquarian-dominated nadir, on the grounds that experimentation at the Society revived somewhat with the popularity of electricity (p. 40, note 114).

A neglected source which offers a valuable characterization of shifts of interest based on an analysis of the Philosophical transactions from 1720–60 is Potter G. R. , “The significance to the history of English natural science of John Hill's ‘Review of the works of the Royal Society’”, University of California publications in English, xiv (1943), 157–80. See also Carter H. B. , Sir Joseph Banks (London, 1988), 571, 572.

Shapin S. , “The house of experiment in seventeenth-century England”, Isis, lxxix (1988), 373–404. To say that the Royal Society worked primarily as a receiver of reports on work done elsewhere does not, of course, mean that it was divorced from the production of experimental work. Indeed it seems probable that the Society had a great deal to do with the evolution of the literary and social technologies of various areas of experimental work during the course of the eighteenth century. James Hartley is exploring, among other things, the progressive development in various areas of experimental natural philosophy of increasingly stylized and abstract representations of that experimental work in a Ph.D. thesis titled “The development of the literary technologies of experimental natural philosophy as seen through the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London”, School of Science & Technology Studies, University of New South Wales.

Jacob Compare , The cultural meaning (ref. 10), for a similar diagnosis of the reasons why historians of eighteenth century science have steered clear of the Royal Society and “… refused to write its history, lamented its decline, and hinted at its corruption” (153). However, Jacob's single-minded attempt to re-assimilate the science of the scientific revolution and the entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution in the Royal Society's supposed emphasis on ‘utility’ in the eighteenth century is itself a rather strained and uni-dimensional characterization of the Society.

See Evans J. , A history of the Society of Antiquaries (Oxford, 1956), 100–2.

Shapiro B. J. , “History and natural history in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England: An essay on the relationship between humanism and science”, in Shapiro B. J. Frank R. G. Jr (eds), English scientific virtuosi in the 16th and 17th centuries (Los Angeles, 1979), 1–55, pp. 25–26.

Ibid., 37.

Kuhn T. S. , “Mathematical vs. experimental traditions in the development of physical science”, Journal of interdisciplinary history, vii (1976), 1–31 draws the distinction in physical science between the ‘classical’ and the ‘Baconian’ physical sciences, the former being highly mathematical and the preserve of trained specialists, the latter being experimental, making only very modest use of mathematics (if any) in the eighteenth century, and relatively open to amateurs. The natural history sciences and antiquarianism presumably share the democratic character of the latter par excellence. For relevant discussions of classifications in the sciences in the eighteenth century see Cantor G. N. , “The eighteenth-century problem”, History of science, xx (1982), 44–68 and Schaffer , “Natural philosophy and public spectacle” (ref. 8), 16 on the “complex of atmospheric knowledge”.

Evans , Society of Antiquaries (ref. 16), 49, 94–95.

Hill J. , A review of the works of the Royal Society (London, 1751), Part 2, 47.

Evans , Society of Antiquaries (ref. 16), 152.

See Piggott S. , Ruins in a landscape: Essays in antiquarianism (Edinburgh, 1976), ch. 6.

A prosopographical analysis of the Royal Society Council from 1750 reveals, not surprisingly, an affinity between antiquarian interests and natural historical ones. There is also a marked tendency for those with such interests to provide accounts of earthquakes, comets, weather, agitation of waters etc. to the Royal Society, a number of which were published in the Philosophical transactions (see, for example, papers by Swithen Adee, James Burrow, Philip Carteret Webb, Jeremiah Milles, Peter Newcome, Edward King, Andrew Coltee Ducarel, John Blair, Charles Lyttleton, and Thomas Birch).

Hunter M. Wood P. B. , “Towards Solomon's House: Rival strategies for reforming the early Royal Society”, History of science, xxiv (1986), 49–108, p. 50.

Ibid., 64–65.

Miller D. P. , “Sir Joseph Banks: An historiographical perspective”, History of science, xix (1981), 284–92. See also the recent extensive account of the dissensions of the early 1780s given in Carter, Sir Joseph Banks (ref. 13), ch. 9.

Carter , Sir Joseph Banks (ref. 13), 133.

See for example Joseph Banks to John Lloyd, 23 February 1780, National Library of Wales, MS. 12415C. Banks comments: “Ld. Mahon has published a book upon Electricity … he has done little but apply Conic Sections infinite series & Fluxions to explain the laws of Electricity which I look upon in the same light as driving it like a Fox into an Earth from whence our electricians will never be able to dig it.”.

Gunther A. E. , “The Royal Society and the foundation of the British Museum”, Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, xxxiii (1978–79), 207–16, pp. 211–12. Very close links continued however between the Society and the Museum. See Miller D. P. , “The Royal Society of London, 1800–1835: A study in the cultural politics of scientific organization” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1981), 46–49. But compare A. E. Gunther, The founders of science at the British Museum (Suffolk, 1980), chs 3 and 4.

Schaffer , “Natural philosophy and public spectacle” (ref. 8), implies a virtual police action, in which the Royal Society was involved, over experimental natural philosophy of the more public, spectacular and enthusiastic kind. See also Gillespie R. , “Ballooning in France and Britain, 1783–1786: Aerostation and adventurism”, Isis, lxxv (1984), 249–68, esp. 261–4, for suspicions of a particular French enthusiasm on the part of Banks and the Royal Society.

Mackay D. , In the wake of Cook: Exploration, science and empire, 1780–1801 (London, 1985).

Ibid. , 17–24 and passim.

Lyons , The Royal Society (ref. 9), 202; Cameron H. C. , Sir Joseph Banks K.B., P.R.S: The autocrat of the philosophers (London, 1952), 128.

See Cantor , “Eighteenth-century problem” (ref. 19), 58 for his comments on the difficulty in delineating a natural philosophical community in Britain in the eighteenth century.