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advantage we were enabled, to the wonder of the Beholders, to kill the Animal in less than half a minute.’ The experimentation was not, for some time, organised or systematic; sometimes the wonder of the beholders was the chief result. The
Philosophical Transactions
served as a progenitor of
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
as well as the
Physical Review.
    ‘There follow topsy-turvy without any order experiments of all sorts,’ wrote Goethe more than a century later, ‘news of happenings on earth and in the heavens.’ Goethe bore the Royal Society no small resentment, which he nursed by devotedly reading its history, as set down by both Thomas Sprat and Thomas Birch. He translated many pages of extracts, and he complained: ‘Everybody communicates what happens to be at hand, phenomena
of Naturlehre,
objects
of Naturgeschichte,
technical operations, everything appearing topsy-turvy without order. Many things quite insignificant, others interesting only in outward appearance, others merely curious, are accepted and given a place.’
    Opposite:

Engravings of Boyle’s air pumps. The top left engraving is from the backpiece to
New Experiments: Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects,
by Robert Boyle, 1660.
    It was not until late in 1671 that the members heard about a young Lincolnshire man, Isaac Newton, who had invented a new kind of telescope at least ten times more powerful, inch for inch, than any in existence. He had not sent it to them. He had made it in 1668 or 1669 in Cambridge, where he had just become the new Professor of Mathematics, but kept it mostly to himself. Cambridge being some distance from London, more than two years passed before the news, and then the telescope, reached the Royal Society. As they could see, it was not just a serious scientific advance but a technology with military application. They studied it and showed it to the King. Henry Oldenburg wrote to the twenty-nine-year-old on their behalf. ‘Sir,’ he began, ‘Your Ingenuity is the occasion of this addresse by a hand unknown to you … ’ In short order they elected him a member, though none had yet met him.
    For some time Newton had been reading the Society’s reports and taking careful note. News of a fiery mountain: ‘Batavia one afternone was covered with a black dust heavyer than gold which is thought came from an hill on Java Major supposed to burne.’ Lunar influence: ‘Oysters & Crabs are fat at the new moone & leane at the full.’ Now he wrote to Oldenburg at the only address he knew –
‘Mr Henry Oldenburge at his house about the middle of the old Palmail in St Jamses Fields in Westminster’
– and said he had news of his own. He advertised it enthusiastically: ‘… in my Judgment the oddest if not the most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in the operations of Nature.’
    The meeting of 8 February 1672 began as usual with the reading out of letters newly arrived. First came a conjecture from John Wallis that the Moon’s varying distance to the Earth, its perigee and apogee, might ‘much influence the rising and falling of the mercury in the barometer’. He hoped that members of the Society who had barometers would investigate. It was another idea destined for the dustbin.
    Next, Tommaso Cornelio wrote from Naples, in Italian, to refute common stories told of the odd effects of the bite of the tarantula. His observations suggested that most such stories were fictitious. (Many, he added soon afterward, come from ‘young wanton girles who by some particular indisposition falling into this melancholly madness, perswade themselvesaccording to the vulgar prejudice, to have been stung by a Tarantula’.)
    The third letter was more complicated: ‘Of Mr Isaac Newton from Cambridge, concerning his discovery of the nature of light, refractions, and colour …’ Sunlight, according to this letter, is not homogenous, but consists ‘of different rays’. These rays come in pure