Robert Hooke’s Science of ‘Petrifaction’, the Trattato del Legno Fossile, and the Republic of Letters

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project of investigating the reception of the Accademia dei Lincei at the Royal Society. Perhaps due to the Lincei’s hesitancy to make more use of print, they constituted somewhat of a mystery for the subsequent generations of scientific communities. This is to say that the members of Royal Society were open to or perhaps even actively searching for knowledge related to the Lynxes. In this work, I trace this through a particular case-study in the transmission of knowledge: the arrival at the Royal Society of Federico Cesi and Francesto Stelluti’s Trattato del Legno Fossile Minerale Nuovamente Scoperto [Treatise on the Newly Discovered Mineral Fossil Wood] (1637) and its accompanying lignum fossile specimen. I aim to show how Robert Hooke, early keeper of the Society’s repository, diverged significantly from the initial sense of Cesi and Stelluti: if for the latter the specimen attested for a Renaissance-type continuous chain of being, the former appropriated it in his own theory of geomorphological change and ‘petrifaction’. Throughout this article, I also reflect more broadly on other two related issues: 1. The status of the discipline of petrification during the early modern times; 2. The availability of Lincean sources in England and Europe – while pointing out that much more work needs to be done in order to properly chart the dissemination of the Lynxes’s works. I conclude by indicating that the Lynxes played a key role in Hooke’s genealogical argument on the right use of microscopy.