John Evelyn, Silva (London: Scott, 1706). 634.91 Eu22
John Evelyn, Silva (London: Scott, 1706). 634.91 Eu22
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.