This publication presents a new text of Robert Boyle’s prescriptions for the writing of natural history, compiled in 1666 and partially divulged in 1684, but unpublished till modern times. The current edition restores the text to its correct order for the first time, and adds various cognate documents, including certain sections of the ‘Designe’ which survive elsewhere among the Boyle Papers at the Royal Society and are here first published. The result is to supply a significant document for understanding the evolution of Baconian method during the formative years of the Royal Society.
The editors are Michael Hunter, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and Director of the Robert Boyle Project, and Peter Anstey, Professor of Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
(Text from the publisher's website at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/boyle/researchers/occasional_papers.htm