HENRY OLDENBURG, SEC. ROY. SOC. 39 
Tower, for writing newes’ to a virtuoso in France, with 
whom he constantly corresponds in philosophical matters; 
which makes it very unsafe at this time to write, or almost 
do anything.” Weld,’ who has given a more circumstantial 
account of this incident, calls it “a very remarkable event 
which seems to have had so much influence upon the Society 
as to cause a suspension of the Meetings from the 30th May 
to the 3rd October”. Yet the event appears less remarkable 
when we remember that the citizens of London—already 
severely shaken by the Great Plague and the Great Fire of 
the two previous years—were listening, for the first time, 
to the guns of a foreign fleet advancing up the Thames 
at the moment when they clapped Oldenburg in jail. Evelyn 
says*® “‘The alarme was so greate that it put both Country 
and Citty into a paniq, feare and consternation, such as I 
hope I shall never see more.”” But the Londoners were then 
feeling far more afraid of the fierce Dutch Admiral de Ruyter 
than of the mild German-English scientist, and poor Olden- 
burg was soon exonerated. On his release from the Tower he 
wrote to Boyle (8 September 1667): “I hope I shall live fully 
to satisfy his majesty and all honest Englishmen of my 
integrity, and of my real zeal to spend the remainder of my 
hfe in doing faithful service to the nation to the very utmost 
of my abilities’: which he did. 
Among Oldenburg’s innumerable correspondents was the 
youthful but already famous Dutch physician Reinier de 
Graaf,’ a friend and fellow-townsman of Leeuwenhoek. (See 
_ ‘Cf. also Evelyn (Diary, 8 Aug. 1677) : ‘‘ Visited Mr. Oldenburg, a close 
prisoner in the Tower, being suspected of writing intelligence.”’ 
* Weld (1848), I, 201 sq. 
* Diary, 18 June 1667. John Evelyn (1620-1706) was an original 
Fellow of the Royal Society, and Secretary in 1672. 
* Reinier [sew Regnerus ] de Graaf (1641-1673) was born at Schoonhoven, 
studied under Sylvius at Leyden, and practised (and died) at Delft. His 
anatomical researches——especially upon the organs of generation—are still 
well known. The “ Graafian follicle’? of the ovary (which he regarded as 
an egg) enshrines his memory. His Opera Omnia were first published 
posthumously at Leyden in 1677. (L. has left it on record that his 
untimely death was hastened by his embittered controversy with 
Swammerdam over the priority of their anatomical discoveries.) He did 
not live to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, but died at the age of 
32, after a brief but brilliant career, in the very year in which he introduced L. 
