THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD 85 



In reply, Newton casually remarked that he had solved the 

 problem five years previously but had mislaid the proof. But 

 for Halley's coaxing and insistence, Newton's great work 

 would probably never have been published as a whole, and 

 it owed its publication largely to a quarrel with Hooke and 

 the sequel to that quarrel. The story of this extraordinary 

 man in relation to the science of his age is discussed in an 

 interesting series of papers published in Nature in 1942 to 

 celebrate the tercentenary of his birth. 



The Royal Society was not the first scientific society. That 

 honor belongs to Italy, w^here the Accademia del Cimento (the 

 Experimental Society) was organized in Florence in 1657. It 

 was not an association of independent workers; it was formed 

 by the Medici brothers— the Grand Duke Ferdinand II and 

 Leopold of Tuscany. The Academy held its meetings at the 

 palace of Leopold, who defrayed all expenses and was the 

 active leader of the group. The members were ardent ama- 

 teurs in experimental work, many of them disciples of Galileo 

 or students of his disciples. When Leopold became a car- 

 dinal in 1667, the Academy was given up, but an account of 

 the work of its members was published, entitled "Saggi di 

 Naturali Esperienze Fatte Nell' Accademia del Cimento." 

 This account contained so inuch experimental detail that it 

 became the laboratory manual of the period. It was trans- 

 lated into English in 1684, Latin in 1731, French in 1755, 

 and was republished in a new edition in 1780. This book 

 formed the beginning of experimental physics and gave Italy 

 the leadership in that field at the time. 



The Academic des Sciences, founded in 1666, arose, like 

 the Royal Society, from the meetings of a group of enthusi- 

 astic amateurs. Jean Baptiste Colbert, the great minister of 

 Louis XIV, obtained for it the patronage of that monarch 

 and the support of the French treasury. Colbert believed 

 firmly in a strongly centralized government, a policy that 

 was to some extent responsible for the misgovernment that 

 eventually led to the French Revolution. The Academic 

 was organized as a co-operative laboratory for scientific re- 



