BY DR. DERHAM. 



31 



Secretary of the Royal Society, (who had for some time 

 intermitted the correspondence which he before had with 

 Mr. Ray,) began now to renew it again, by letters sent 

 almost every month. He was a very diligent secretary, 

 and laboured very heartily to keep up the Society's cor- 

 respondence, and get all the information he could about 

 curious matters, from all persons that he knew, or heard 

 were able to furnish him with any: and the better to 

 accomplish his ends, he would send his ingenious corre- 

 spondents an account of matters that came to his know- 

 rived from the publication of their Transactions. " I have some grounds to 

 believe," he remarks, " that there are persons who thmk the Transactions 

 bring me in a sufficient revenue ; but I wiE. make it out to any man that I 

 never received more than 40/. a year upon this account (and that is little 

 more than my house rent), and now by a new agreement I have been obliged 

 to make, I shall not bring it to above 36/. a year at most. How strangely 

 therefore I must needs shift for my subsistence, and with what distraction 1 

 must perform my tedious work, let any sober man judge." The following 

 year Dr. Ward, then Bishop of Salisbury, suggested to the council of the 

 Society the propriety of making some allowance to their secretary, observing 

 that for his own part he was ashamed that Oldenburg should have been per- 

 mitted to devote so much time and pains to the business of the Society 

 without any consideration. The result of the application does not appear. 

 The Transactions pubHshed by Oldenburg extend from No. 1, dated March 

 6th, 1664, to No. 136, dated June 25th, 1677, the year preceding his death. 

 In 1675, he was accused by Hooke of not having done justice to him on the 

 subject of the invention of spiral springs for pocket watches. The dispute 

 which ensued was at length terminated by a declaration of the council, 

 " that the publisher of the Transactions had carried himself faithfully and 

 honestly in the managing of the intelligence of the Royal Society, and had 

 given no cause for such reflections." 



Oldenburg married the daughter of the famous John Dury, vdth whom he 

 received an estate in Kent, valued at 60/. a year. His only child was Rupert, 

 named after his godfather Prince Rupert. He died, according to most au- 

 thorities, in 1678 (Thomson says September 1677), at Charlton, between 

 Greenwich and Woolwich, where his body was interred. 



He is author of a few short papers upon medical and other subjects in the 

 ' Philosophical Transactions,' and also of some " twenty tracts, chiefly theo- 

 logical and political, in which he principally aimed at reconciling difPerences 

 and promoting peace and unanimity." (Hutton.) He published, under the 

 name of ' Grubendol' (an anagrammatised form of his real name), English 

 translations of — 1, ' Prodromus to a dissertation by Nich. Steno, concerning 

 solids naturally contained within solids,' (1671, 8vo. ;) 2, 'A genuine explica- 

 tion of the Book of Revelations, full of sundry new Christian Considerations;' 

 3, ' The Life of the Duchess of Mazarine,' from the Prench. It is also stated 

 that he translated several of Mr. Boyle's works into Latin. 



The letters of Oldenburg, dated in 1667, leave no doubt that during some 

 part of that year he was confined to the Tower upon political grounds. 



