A speculum of chymical practice: Isaac Newton, Martin Lister (1639 −1712), and the making of telescopic mirrors

In 1674 the natural philosopher and physician Martin Lister published a new method of making glass of antimony for telescopic mirrors, using Derbyshire cawk or barite as a flux. New manuscript evidence reveals that Sir Isaac Newton requested samples of the cawk and antimony from Lister through an intermediary named Nathaniel Johnston. An analysis of Lister’s paper and Johnston’s correspondence and its context reveals insights not only about Newton’s work with telescopic specula but also about his alchemical investigations. Analysing these sources also contributes to our understanding of the nature of correspondence networks in the early ‘scientific revolution’ in England

The correspondence of Dr. Martin Lister (1639-1712) [Volume One 1662-1677]

Martin Lister (1639–1712) was a consummate virtuoso, the first arachnologist and conchologist, and a Royal physician. As one of the most prominent corresponding fellows of the Royal Society, many of Lister’s discoveries in natural history, archaeology, medicine, and chemistry were printed in the Philosophical Transactions. Lister corresponded extensively with explorers and other virtuosi such as John Ray, who provided him with specimens, observations, and locality records from Jamaica, America, Barbados, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and his native England. This volume of ca. 400 letters (one of three), consists of Lister’s correspondence dated from 1662 to 1677, including his time as a Cambridge Fellow, his medical training in Montpellier, and his years as a practicing physician in York

The Saline chymistry of color in seventeenth-century English natural history

Before Newton’s seminal work on the spectrum, seventeenth-century English natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Nehemiah Grew and Robert Plot attributed the phenomenon of color in the natural world to salts and saline chymistry. They rejected Aristotelian ideas that color was related to the object’s hot and cold quali- ties, positing instead that saline principles governed color and color changes in flora, fauna and minerals. In our study, we also characterize to what extent chymistry was a basic analytical tool for seventeenth-century English natural historians

The chymistry of "The Learned Dr Plot" (1640-96)

In the seventeenth century, there were developing norms of openness in the presentation of scientific knowledge that were at odds with traditions of secrecy among chymists, particularly practitioners of chrysopoeia, or the transmutation of metals. This chapter analyzes how Dr. Robert Plot, the first professor of chymistry at Oxford, negotiated these boundaries within an institutional context. I first delineate his chymical and experimental practice, which incorporated procedures from medieval alchemical sources, particularly the Lullian corpus, as well as more novel practices from seventeenth-century chymistry. Then, I analyze how personal and institutional ambitions and economic considerations shaped to what extent Plot negotiated the boundaries between secrecy and the public dissemination of chymical knowledge

Newton and the apothecary

The Grantham Corporation Minute Books and inventories from the apothecary shop of Ralph and William Clarke are analysed to illuminate neglected aspects of the life and letters of Sir Isaac Newton, particularly the influence of Lincolnshire social and intellectual networks. The article also examines the nature of rural health provision in early modern Grantha

Johann Heinrich Cohausen (1665–1750), Salt Iatrochemistry, and Theories of Longevity in his Satire, Hermippus Redivivus (1742)

Johann Heinrich Cohausen (1665–1750) was a physician and well-known author in the Germanies, France, and England He was best known for medical satire such as the Pica Nasi, a Latin parody on snuff in which Apollo ordered Mercury to confiscate the noses of snuff-takers. When the satyrs returned them, the desperate victims grabbed the wrong noses and were unrecognizable. The subject of this article however is Cohausen’s last and most famous medical satire, his Hermippus redivivus (1742), a treatise on the prolongation of life. Studies of Cohausen and the Hermippus have been largely antiquarian; the only scholarly works are a French dissertation concerning his medical biography done in 1900 and a short German bibliographic study. Because Cohausen has been primarily known for medical satire, his large number of serious treatises on iatrochemistry and medicine, which served as the basis for his more humorous works, have been largely unexamined. This paper will thus demonstrate that Cohausen’s Hermippus and its comedic presentation of longevity had a profound reliance on earlier scholarly works of his that analysed the theories of the seventeenth-century chymist and physician Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1577–1634)

Mineral waters across the Channel: matter theory and natural history from Samuel Duclos’s Minerallogenesis to Martin Lister’s Chymical Magnetism, ca. 1666–1686

The 1675 Observations sur les eaux minerales des plusieurs provinces de France by Samuel Du Clos is a study of French mineral waters commissioned by the Académie royale des sciences. Neither its relatively obscure author nor its tedious enumeration of French spring waters, part of the Académie’s commitment to collective natural histories, stand out. Yet an examination of the chronicles of its production, transmission, and reception—focusing on the personal and institutional backgrounds of its author and main recipient across the Channel, the English naturalist Martin Lister (1639–1712)—sheds light on the changing attitudes toward chymical knowledge, practice, and scientific communication in both private and public contexts

Afterword: Dismiss the Antiquary at Your Peril

This special issue eruditely demonstrates the deep interconnections between British antiquarianism, natural philosophy and medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These stimulating papers, representing the state of the field, include: analysis of classical antecedents for balneology; Sir Isaac Newton's attempts to restore the prisca sapientia and use of mathematics to reform knowledge of antiquity; editors and autograph collectors who preserved the still extant correspondence (and hence the intellectual geography and networks) of early modern antiquaries; and the re‐enactment of ancient landscapes and relics using geological theory and three‐dimensional museum exhibits. As Susan Pearce pointed out, Jeremiah Milles, in his presidential address to the Society of Antiquaries in 1781, remarked that ‘History, Science and Art may claim an equal share in the Attention and Labour of the Antiquary’

Keeping natural philosophy alive in eighteenth-Century Oxford: John Whiteside (1679-1729) and William Huddesford (1732-1772)

This paper focuses upon two keepers of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, oft forgotten, that were important to promoting natural philosophy, and promoting it well in Oxford in the unloved eighteenth century: John Whiteside (1679-1729) and William Huddesford (1732-1772). Whiteside, elected keeper on 14 December 1714, was a member of Christchurch and clergyman, a keen and talented astronomer, an FRS, and Edmond Halley communicated two of his astronomical observations to the Royal Society. Huddesford was also not only a significant natural historian, but an antiquarian who we have to thank for preserving the early modern archives in the natural sciences, and for shaping our own views of the history of science. An analysis of the work of Whiteside and Huddesford demonstrates that we need to think more about Georgian keepers of the Ashmolean as proper natural philosophers and antiquaries beyond the usual narratives of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, which premise an eighteenth-century decline

Taking Newton on tour: the scientific travel diaries of Martin Folkes, 1733-1735

Martin Folkes (1690-1754) was Newton’s protégé, an English antiquary, mathematician, numismatist and astronomer, who would in the latter part of his career become President of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries at the same time. Folkes took a Grand Tour from 1732/3 to 1735, recording the Italian leg of his journey from Padua to Rome in his journal. This paper examines Folkes’s travel diary to analyse his intellectual development as a Newtonian and as a proponent of what I will term ‘antiquarian science’, a form of perigrination in which he used metrology to understand not only the aesthetics but the engineering principles of antique buildings and artefacts, as well as their context and place in the Italian landscape. Using Folkes’ diary, his account book of his journey in the Norwich archives, and accompanying correspondence with other natural philosophers such as Anders Celsius (1701-44) and Abbe Antonio Schinella Conti (1667-1749), I will also demonstrate in this paper to what extent this journey established his reputation as an international broker of Newtonianism as well as the overall primacy of English scientific instrumentation to Italian virtuosi