time: the refreshing river 



Oxford and in London, who called themselves the "Invisible College." 

 The first mention of them occurs in 1646, but their incorporation 

 under the present name did not occur till 1663. The preoccupation 

 of the early Fellows with practical interests, with the "improvement 

 of trade and husbandry," is patent to anyone acquainted with its 

 early history. Thus the great Robert Boyle wrote to a friend, Mar- 

 combes:^ "The other humane studies I apply myself to are natural 

 philosophy, the mechanics, and husbandry, according to the principles 

 of our new philosophical colledge, that values no knowledge, but as 

 it hath a tendency to use. And therefore I shall make it one of my 

 suits to you, that you would take the pains to enquire a little more 

 thoroughly into the ways of husbandry, etc., practised in your parts; 

 and when you intend for England, to bring along with you what 

 good receipts or choice books of any of these subjects you can pro- 

 cure; which will make you extremely welcome to our invisible 

 colledge, which I had now designed to give you a description of." 

 Among Robert Hooke's papers in the British Museum,^ Weld records 

 a statement, dated 1663 — "The business and design of the Royal 

 Society is to improve the knowledge of naturall things and all usefull 

 Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by 

 Experiments." Or if we look through the account and defence of 

 the Royal Society published by Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, 

 some years later,^we find that he gives a series of thirteen sample 

 papers from the reports of the Society to show what good it has done. 

 Of these thirteen, five are purely technical (wine, guns, salt-petre, 

 dyeing, oysters), two are to do with exploration, and three with 

 meteorology and astronomy, important for navigation, making a 

 total of ten which would be "for the improvement of husbandry." 

 The remaining three we should now call "pure science," and were 

 devoted two to chemistry and one to physiology. 



It is clear, then, that seventeenth-century science was expanding in 

 the closest relationship with industrial enterprise. The scientific men 

 took, indeed, little or no part in politics, but they definitely depended 

 for their support on the party standing between and against the two 

 groups already described (the Laudian Churchmen and the Levellers). 

 The former were representatives of a dying pre-scientific collectivism, 

 the latter were pioneers of a collectivism to which even yet we have 



1 Quoted by Fulton, J. F., Isis, 1932, 18, 84. 



2 Weld, C. R., History of the Royal Society (Parker, London, 1848). 



' Sprat, T., The History of the Royal Society of London (Knap ton, London, 1722). 



84 



