The elite members of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge founded in 1660 paid a great deal of attention to learning and improving upon the secrets of craftsmen. Amazingly, John Evelyn wrote some of the first works on forestry management (Silva), on air pollution (Fumifugium), and even on the history and art of salad (Acetaria)! Such interests were remarkable (and to some contemporary observers, laughable) due to the social mores of the team limiting the involvement of gentlemen and aristocrats in menial labor. A widely circulated poem (the “Ballad of Gresham College”) poking fun at the new Royal Society targeted John Evelyn in particular:

. . .Its Author hath a publique spirit
And doubtlesse too a subtile head
He must be more than John an Oake
Who writes soe learnedly of smoake.

He shewes that ‘t is the seacole smoke
That allways London doth Inviron,
Which doth our Lungs and Spiritts choake,
Our hanging spoyle, and rust our Iron.
Lett none att Fumifuge be scoffing
Who heard att Church our Sundaye’s Coughing.

For melioration of the Ayre
Both for our Lungs and eke our noses,
To plant the Fields he doth take care
With Cedar, Juniper and Roses,
Which, turn’d to trees, ‘t is understood,
Wee shall instead of coale burne wood.

O blessed witt that thus contrives
By new found out but facile Arte
In pleasure to lengthen out our lives.
To teach us next to perfume —
And without fuell or smoake make fire
Some other Member will aspire.

The elite justified such interests to themselves and others through a heroic conception of the advancement of useful knowledge. Francis Bacon had already depicted the advancement of knowledge as the dramatic conquest of new lands of knowledge. The elite, once martial leaders, could now present themselves as at the forefront of a new attack upon the unknown. Bacon’s followers deployed the same conquistadorial language to portra their forays into the trades as heroic adventures extending the bounds of knowledge. In the late 1650’s, the future Fellow of the Royal Society, John Beale, argued that improving England’s cider was an “Adventure” deserving of fame every bit as much as “ye Conquest of forreine Kingdomes” (Beal, 25). Once the Society was founded, Beale’s investigations into the improvement of cider continued and are discussed by Evelyn in this volume. Notes of the Society’s meetings record the experimental eating and drinking that took place. On July 25, 1666, for example, “Colonel Blount was desired to try, whether French wine or cherry-wine yielded more and better spirit, taking the same quantity of each of these liquores” (Birch, 106). This was listed as the third desideratum on Blount’s list, “To try whether French wine or Cherry wine does yield most and best spirit. July 26. 1666.” Four months later, on Nov. 14, 1666, Blount “presented the society with several particulars very acceptable to them as 1. Two sorts of English wines,” one of them, the note-taker recorded, “having withal, as some judged, something of the flavour of Rhenish in it.” He also noted, “A pea of English growth. . . .They were very good eating peese” as well as “A spirit extracted out of cherry-wine, very strong.” The Society’s collective (and no doubt tasty) research into cider resulted in such inventions as the cider press invented by Robert Hooke, shown here. As Evelyn says, the Fellows hoped to “gratify the Cider-master” with such new inventions for their trade. Perhaps not surprisingly, tradesmen were not particularly eager to communicate their craft knowledge nor to be advised by Fellows of the Royal Society.

Recommended further reading:

John Beale, Herefordshire Orchards: A Pattern for all England, written in an Epistolary Address to Samuel Hartlib Esq. (London: Mears, 1724).

Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society for Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: Millar, 1756).

Kathleen H. Ochs, “The Royal Society of London’s History of Trades Programme: An Early Episode in Applied
Science,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 39:2 (Apr., 1985), 129-158.

Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the early Royal Society (Wolfeboro, N.H.: Boydell, 1989).

Michael Hunter, “John Evelyn in the 1650s: A Virtuoso in Quest of a Role,” Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 67-98.

Lisa Jardine, The Curious life of Robert Hooke: The Man who Measured London. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

You may have heard the term “imprimatur” used to mean “approval.” Literally, it means “let it be printed” in Latin. Here we can see it used in its literal sense, as Isaac Newton, the current President of the Royal Society gives his approval to the abridged edition of the Philosophical Transactions, the first scientific journal, by saying: “Let it be printed (Imprimatur).”

Take a look at http://ohsu-hca.blogspot.com/ and http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/history-of-science.html !

In his reports upon experiments performed, Boyle attempted to model how the ideal experimental natural philosopher should behave. He should be dutiful, modest, and willing to repeat experiments again and again, in all sorts of varying and sometimes uncomfortable situations, such as atop very high roofs. The model experimental natural philosopher who appears in the works of Boyle and many others of his time was generally male as here, despite Boyle’s collaboration with women, such as his sister, Lady Ranelagh.
Recommended further reading:
Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Pal, Carol. Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

In his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, Fontenelle promised to pull aside the stage curtain and present the world as it really was. In the absolutist France of the time, court plays frequently presented grand illusions, deploying massive machinery and moving painted scenes to depict the heavens revolving around the Sun King, Louis XIV. To a contemporary viewer familiar with such works, it might well have been particularly thrilling to open up this engraving, tipped in and folded within the Fontenelle’s volume, and to see before her or his eyes a still grander stage set of the universe, full of many worlds, each revolving around their own suns.
Recommended further reading:
Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. Le roi-machine: spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981.
Burke, Peter. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Although often considered the first scientific periodical, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society also illustrated many secrets and discoveries within the arts, such as drawing frames, perspective machines and methods for casting statues, as seen here in this tipped-in engraving. The study of artistic techniques was one of the many interests of the early Royal Society. The exhibition already shows another perspectival machine from the Renaissance artist Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s work on perspective, edited by the mathematician Egnazio Danti (below). Gentleman natural philosophers such as the fellows of the Royal Society drew upon many previous practices testing the boundaries of art and nature. While interested in the exact description of nature aided by technology (as was Vignola), they also appreciated the playfulness of nature. Vignola’s work, for instance, also illustrated how one might make anamorphic images (carefully plotted scenes which reveal different images from different perspectives, below). These could be used in perspective boxes, small boxes with painted interiors and carefully plotted peepholes. Anamorphic images demonstrate the penchant of the period for “serious jokes,” that is, playful entertainment which ingeniously explores important subjects, such as geometry and optics.

To see how Vignola put perspective into practice, visit the Villa Farnese he built in Caprarola (in Italian, but the architecture speaks for itself):
http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-24945cd3-a2fc-4292-8806-68ec7cad488b.html?p=0
For more perspective boxes, see:
http://www.dia.org/object-info/24ca1321-c63a-4ca3-b1b5-115b0f27e2d1.aspx

http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/2009/05/02/anamorphic-skulls-and-songbird/

For the nineteenth-century anorthoscopic inventions of Joseph Plateau, see:
http://www.mhsgent.ugent.be/engl-plat4.html

Recommended further reading:
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
Baltrušaitis, Jurgis. Anamorphic art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977.
Kaufmann, Thomas Da Costa. The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998.
Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in early modern European culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

The collections of the Royal Society of London, an innovative center for experimental natural philosophy founded at the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, drew on the culture of curiosity of the time. It displayed the hidden anatomy of many exotic creatures, such as this “Crocodile or ye Leviathan.”  To the lower left of this massive, tipped-in and folded engraving, is the Crocodile’s “Wesan” or wind-pipe. At the center bottom is the rattle of a rattle snake and to the lower left is an elephant’s tusk. Other exotic creatures included the similarly Biblically named “Behemoth” or Hippo below. More humble creatures also, however, received serious attention such as the anatomy of salmon guts. Another feature of the culture of curiosity was an interest in play, and more specifically in the ways that Nature herself was playful. Nature appeared to play when she crossed the boundaries separating herself from the human world by producing seeming works of art, while humans played by producing seeming works of nature. At the far bottom, among curious stones in the Royal Society’s collection are several with seemingly artful designs, such as a geometric Jasper and a “figured stone,” or a stone in which Nature appeared, as it were, to paint a landscape.

 

Recommended further reading:
Bredekamp, Horst. The lure of antiquity and the cult of the machine: the Kunstkammer and the evolution of nature, art, and technology. Princeton: M. Wiener Publishers, 1995.
Stagl, Justin. A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1500-1800. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995.
Kenny, Neil. Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998.
R. J. W. Evans and Alexandar Marr, eds. Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman, eds.The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

In the exhibit, this large folio was opened to a page illustrating the great variety of Chinese headgear. This showed how the same practices of collecting and categorizing applied to culture as to nature in the period. The volume is also full of much exciting Chinese nature such as these so-called “Flying Apes.” Jesuit missionaries deployed their knowledge of nature, particularly astronomy, to gain access to the Chinese court, while knowledge of Chinese nature was also popular in Europe.

Recommended further reading:
Athanasius Kircher, Athanasii Kircheri e Soc. Jesu China monumentis, qvà sacris quà profanis, nec non variis naturæ & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata. Amsterdam: Waesberge, 1667.
Warner C 951 K632 Shelf D
Reed, Marcia, and Paola Demattè, eds. China on Paper: European and Chinese works from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Los Angeles, Calif: Getty Research Institute, 2007.