Introduction

Abstract

Just as visitors to eighteenth-century London were puzzled by the modest nature of the Hanoverian Court of St James compared to the glories of the Bourbon Versailles or the Romanov St Petersburg, so too have historians wondered at the lack of magnificence of the eighteenth-century Royal Society when compared to the Academies of continental Europe. Where, after the death of Newton, are the likes of Buffon, Clairaut, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier and Linnaeus to be found in Britain? Why, until George III (and then only sporadically and indirectly), was the Royal Society not particularly Royal at all, being left to fend for itself in the cramped quarters of Crane Court – closer to stock jobbers and grocers than to courtiers and state officials – until the end of the century? What great inventions are to be laid at the door of the Fellows of a Society whose founding rhetoric included that of utility? And what, finally, are we to make of the obscure country parsons who sent in to the Society their seemingly random papers on Roman coins, violent thunderstorms or two-headed calves? The Royal Society of London was not an Academy that hired Academicians of great theoretical or mathematical brilliance to bring glory to its princely patron or to solve technical problems. It was a club that elected its own Fellows and relied upon them, and not the King, for funds and action. They respected the plain fact, and those who could produce it, and were suspicious of generalizations and generalizers. While they revered their greatest Fellow, Sir Isaac Newton, they largely ignored his mathematizing methodology and concentrated on the production of novel experimental effects, accurate measurement and meticulous natural history. Their energy waxed and waned, but never disappeared; this issue of the BJHS is dedicated to showing some of them at work at an important eighteenth-century London club.