142 ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE 



pointing perhaps to the large proportion of medical men which outerecl at that 

 time into the asi^ociition. Finally, it is provided that if abuses i^hould occur or 

 dissensions arise, the Archbishop of Canterbury and certain high officers of 

 state shall be invested with powers for removing such abuses and deciding such 

 controversies.* j 



The first j)resident of the Society, after the incorporation, was Lord Brouacker; '^ 

 the secretaries, Dr. "Wilkins and Henry Oldenburg; all ap{)ointed by the crown. 

 " Some idea may be formed of the activity of the Society at this period by the 

 following list of eight committees appointed on the 30th JMarch, 1GG4 : 1. 

 Mechanical, consisting of sixty-nine members. 2. Astronomical and optical, 

 fifteen members. 3. Anatomical, consisting of Boyle, llookc. Dr. Wilkins, and 

 all the physicians of the Society. 4. Chymical, comjjrising all the jthysicians 

 of the Society, and seven other Fellows. 5. Georgical, consisting of thirty-two 

 members. 6. For histories of trades, consisting of thirty-five members. 7. For 

 collecting all the phenomena of nature hitherto observed, and all experiments 

 made and recorded, consisting of twenty-one members. 8. For correspondence, 

 consisting of twenty members." Oldenburg, about this time, received, as he 

 tells Boyle, the agreeable assurance from his correspondents in Paris, that "the 

 English })hilosoph(.'rs were doing more for science than all the other nations of 

 Europe, as well in curious and detached particulars as in the great works given 

 to the public." 



The labors of the Society were destined to be soon interrupted by the ])lague 

 of 1G()5, which drove the members very generally from London. Oldenburg, 

 however, remained at his post, and continued his correspondence on scientific 

 matters during the Avhole period of the pestilence. When the meetings of the 

 Society Avere resumed, the sources of the late calamity became naturally a sub- 

 ject of investigation, and on this occasion the animalcular origin of the epidemic 

 was suggested. But " the vermination of the air as the cause of the plague" 

 was supposed to have received its strongest confirmation in Italy, where Dr. 

 Bacon, who had long practiced physic at llome, Avas said to have observed that 

 " there was a kind of insect in the air Avhich laid eggs hardly discernible with- 

 out a microscope; Avhich eggs being, for an experiment, given to be suufied up 

 by a dog, the animal fell into a distemper accompanied with all the symptoms 

 of the plague." Hooke, however, had observed that, during the summer in 

 question, there was, in London at least, a very great scarcity of flies and insects. 

 A second interruption of the meetings was occasioned by the "great fire" of 

 the following year, for, though the apartments of the Society in Oresham Col- 

 lege (;scaped, that edifice was required for the purposes of the corporation of 

 London. A removal of the meetings to Arundel House, at the invitation of 

 its owner, led in the sequel to a donation of his valuable library, which thus 

 became the nucleus of that of the Society. The collection ci insisted of 3,287 

 printed books, chiefly first editions after the invention of printing, besides 544 

 volumes of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Turkish, and other rare manuscripts, of 

 which the greater part, of both classes, had been purchased in Vienna by an 

 ancestor of the noble house, and comprised the curious and costly collection 

 formed by the celebrated Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary. About this 

 time also the foundations of a museum, or " collection of natural things," was 

 foimed, which, it will not surprise us to be told, comprised, among other articles, 

 " the stones taken out of Lord Balcarres's heart, a bottle lull of stag's teai'S, a 

 pclrified fish, the skin of an antelope which died in St. James's park, a petrified 

 foitus," and other equally extraordinary objects, which the language of the age 

 not unaptly termed " rarities." The rival museum of tin; Tradescants already 

 contained "two feathers of the phoenix tayle" and "a natural dragon!" 



** The charters and statutes of the Society may be seen at large in the appendix to Weld's 

 History of tiii; Kovai. Sociktv, a k'arucd and interesting work, ou whose stateuuents the 

 present brief account is founded. 



