Discovery by Committee: The Investigations of the Royal Society in the 1660s

These days, the advancement of knowledge largely comes through periodic meetings of learned societies and through individual work published on paper and online. The idea of such periodic learned meetings goes back in France and England to the middle of the seventeenth century, when both the Académie française and the Royal Society were founded. Both covered a wide range of knowledge, and both met relatively often, bringing together the leading thinkers in a variety of fields. The Royal Society met in London from the early 1660s onward, with a membership ranging in number upward from twenty. Members included luminaries such as John Aubrey (1626–1697), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), John Evelyn (1620–1706), John Flamsteed (1646–1719), Edmund Halley (1656–1742), Robert Hooke (1635–1703), Thomas Povey (1615–1702), Hans Sloane (1660– 1783), and Christopher Wren (1632–1723); they thus covered a wide variety of specialties and expertise; many of them also corresponded with their counterparts in Europe. At its periodic (often weekly) meetings, the members of the Royal Society read papers, examined specimens, and often conducted experiments. These meetings fell into eight themes: mechanical, astronomical, geological, anatomical, history of trade, “other phenomena of nature,” “questions to be enquired of the remotest parts of the world,” and finally “correspondence.” Each theme generally attracted a large number of contributors, whose activity is described in The History of the Royal Society of London, edited by Thomas Birch (4 vols., London 1756–1757) (see Figure 1.) These contributions were then often published in the Philosophical Transactions, Giving some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies and Labors of the Ingenious in many Considerable Parts of the World