Picturing knowledge in the early Royal Society: the examples of Richard Waller and Henry Hunt
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Abstract
Much of science today relies on visual information of one kind or other for its experiments, observations, simulations and publications. The historical study of how visual resources (such as drawings, prints or models) became integral to scientific knowledge is a developing field and an area to which the pictorial remains of the early Royal Society have much to contribute. This paper examines the examples of Richard Waller (d. 1714 or 1715; FRS 1681) and Henry Hunt (d. 1713), Operator of the Society, who both created images for the Society's publications and meetings. By focusing on their contribution to knowledge rather than on their accuracy, I discuss how images were used to express the Society's aspirations and values, and were integral to the weekly business of investigating nature in the early Royal Society.
Introduction
Today, science is supremely visual. Indeed, one might say, excessively so. Scientists’ overenthusiasm in obtaining ‘perfect’ images by means of image-processing tools has moved the journal Nature, for instance, to set down guidelines for image handling.1 The process of making visible the structures and processes in nature that are normally invisible to the human eye is undoubtedly an integral part of modern scientific endeavour, and there has been an increasing interest among historians of science to understand how visualizing methods such as drawings, atlases, graphs, tables and models developed as part of the practices and ideals of scientific investigation.2 My aim in this paper is to show how the pictorial remains of the early Royal Society can helpfully elucidate some of its aspirations and practices. In focusing on pictorial sources, my approach is less concerned with artistic style or with observational accuracy than with the functions of images. Historians of art have forcefully made the point that naturalistic images do not guarantee direct or accurate observation, and historians of science have underscored the complexity of past observational practices.3 In this paper I examine images and drawings as tools for expressing ideals, pursuing and preserving knowledge and disseminating findings within a collective institution for investigating nature. The examples of Richard Waller (d. 1714 or 1715; FRS 1681) and Henry Hunt (d. 1713) are particularly useful in this regard, because both were actively involved in creating images for the Royal Society.4
Richard Waller is perhaps best known as the editor of Robert Hooke's posthumous works.5 He was skilled in penmanship and drawing, as may be gleaned from his illustrated manuscript of an English translation of a continuation of Virgil's Aeneid, now in the British Library (MS Add. 27347). He may well have learnt how to draw from his mother, Mary Moore (d. 1716), who was a miniaturist who had also written a tract on women's rights.6 Both she and Waller feature often in Robert Hooke's memoranda.7 Waller served as Secretary of the Society from 1687 to 1714 and as Vice-President in 1709. He donated £102 towards the Society's move to Crane Court in 1710.8 Perhaps mindful of his friend Hooke's troubles with the Cutlerian lectures, Waller originally left in his will a provision for a ‘PhisicoMechanick Lecture’ for the Society to be called ‘Wallerian or Wallers Lecture’.9 Waller died late in 1714 or early in 1715.
Little has been written about Henry Hunt's life; Robinson assumed that he was ‘probably an orphan and never married.’10 Hunt, however, recalled in a meeting that his mother used to cure her toothache by inhaling fumes of henbane.11 In his will, furthermore, he mentioned his (by then deceased) daughter Hanna, her husband Jonathan Nunn, a nephew and his children, an aunt, Mrs Sarah Cotton, and an uncle, Jacob Janeway.12 The latter two were siblings, the eighth and ninth of the ten children of a non-conformist minister, William Janeway (d. 1654) of Kelshall, Hertfordshire.13 It may well be through Jacob Janeway, who settled in Canterbury, Kent, that Hunt had connections in the same area.14 Janeway also knew John Tillotson (FRS 1672), which may account for the earliest known work by Hunt (as noted after his death):15
Mr Nun executor to Mr Hunt lately deceased having sent a Box with several copper plates the Box was opened in which was found the following wrot by Mr Hunts own hand.
These Copper Plates were graved by Ben: Janeway and Hen: Hunt, anno 1671 for the Right Reverend John Wilkins Bishop of Chester, in order to his Universal Character, and after his Decease were committed to my care by the Reverend John Tillotson Dean of Canterbury, which I commit to the Royal Society as liklyest to perfect what my Bishop had not time to performe. Hen: Hunt.16
The work mentioned here was the Latin edition of An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (1668) by John Wilkins (FRS 1663), Tillotson's father-in-law.17 This suggests that Hunt knew how to engrave before he went to work for Hooke in 1672. Under Hooke, he learnt how to paint, mix pigments, polish glass, make instruments and draw ground plans.18 Hunt became the Society's Operator in 1676, and then was appointed the Keeper of the Library, and subsequently Keeper of the Repository and the Housekeeper.19 Apart from his wages from the Royal Society, Hunt earned fees from collecting Fellows’ overdue subscriptions and selling Historia piscium.20 Towards the end of his life, he was affluent enough to lend the Society £712, which covered more than one-third of the cost of its move to Crane Court.21 Hunt died in the summer of 1713.
Hunt and Waller, whose active lives thus overlapped at the Society, are recorded frequently as creating images for the Royal Society for its licensed publications, Philosophical Transactions, and for its weekly meetings. Their surviving drawings are evidence of a range of functions that images could fulfil in developing, shaping and presenting knowledge in a scientific academy in the early modern period.
Images for institutional and collective knowledge
In 1684, Waller designed a frontispiece (figure 1) for his translation of Saggi di naturali esperienze, a collection of experimental work carried out by the Florentine Accademia del Cimento under the auspices of Prince Leopold of Tuscany. A copy of the Saggi was presented to the Society as early as 1668 by Lorenzo Magalotti, the secretary of the Accademia del Cimento, but it is from the late 1670s and early 1680s—when Denis Papin (FRS 1680), Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke began to investigate the properties of air—that the barometric experiments in Saggi gained renewed significance for the Society.22 The figures in the frontispiece of Waller's Essayes on natural experiements are readily identifiable from the inscriptions on the hems of their garments. Between Aristotle and the seated Royal Society, nature and the Accademia del Cimento take the central and privileged position, standing on a cloud. ‘Diva natura’ points out to Aristotle what she approves of, namely the book entitled Saggi that the Accademia del Cimento (holding an emblematic crest in her other hand) offers to the seated Royal Society.23 The use of personifications to make programmatic statements about knowledge was a well-known strategy in frontispieces in the seventeenth century, and Waller's frontispiece aptly captures the transition of authority from Aristotle to the Academies, authorized by Nature herself.24 Waller's translation of Saggi was not just about making a book about experimental knowledge by a foreign, princely academy available to an English audience; it was also about asserting the presence of a comparable, English, Royal Society, approved by Nature herself. This would have been an important point to make, especially in the context of the early 1680s when the Society's future seemed uncertain.25 Waller's Essayes thus reflected the current interest of the Society's Fellows as well as their aspirations to be the authoritative institution in interpreting nature.
Figure 1. Title page of Waller, Essayes of natural experiments (London, 1684), from a copy that once belonged to Sir Walter Chetwynd (FRS 1678). ‘R. Waller delin.’ is inscribed at the bottom left of the page. (Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Rel.c.68.6.)
Waller was soon involved in another, similar project of translation, this time of the Academie Royale's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (1671), a study of the animals from the royal menagerie compiled by Claude Perrault. It was originally conceived by minister Jean Baptiste Colbert as a book to glorify Louis XIV, and 200 copies were distributed as gifts to individuals worthy of patronage.26 Although it seems that Waller was first expected to translate the text as well as copy the images, the translation was eventually done by his brother-in-law, Alexander Pitfeild (FRS 1684). The English edition appeared in 1688 as Memoir's for a natural history of animals: containing the anatomical descriptions of several creatures dissected by the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris.27 In the preface, Pitfeild praised Waller's skill in reducing the engravings to about one-quarter of the original size, while skilfully retaining symmetry, proportion and accuracy.28 A comparison of the engravings of the chameleon between the two books confirms that the engraving in Pitfeild's translation (figure 2) was indeed reduced to one-quarter of the original by the artist Sebastién Le Clerc (figure 3), as the height and the width were roughly halved.
Figure 2. Engraving of the chameleon in Memoir's for a natural history of animals (London, 1688), after p. 16, size 19.5 cm × 14.3 cm. From Pitfeild's presentation copy to Robert Hooke. (Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Keynes Q.6.4.) Figure 3. Figure of the chameleon engraved by Sebastién Le Clerc, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (Paris, 1671), after p. 26, size 40 cm × 29 cm. (Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Rel.aa.67.1.)
Pitfeild's translation retained the original declaration about the status of images:
These parts having been considered, and examined with Eyes assisted with Microscopes, when need required, were instantly designed by one of those upon whom the Company had imposed the charge of making the Descriptions; and they were not graved, till all those which were present at the Dissections found that they were wholly conformable to what they had seen. It was thought that it was a thing very advantageous for the perfection of these Figures to be done by a Hand which was guided by other sciences than those of Painting, which are not alone sufficient, because that in this the Importance is not so much to represent well what is seen, as to see well what should be represented.29
The emphasis in the last phrase was a little different in Perrault's original which read: ‘because what was important was not to represent well what one sees, but to see well what one wishes to represent.’30 This reflects Perrault's privileging of the eye of the naturalist above that of artists and others, a point emphasized by many who were involved in image-making for scientific investigation before and after him.31 Pitfeild's translation preserves the superiority of the images of a naturalist over that of an artist, and conveys a somewhat stronger sense of a distinction between ‘what is seen’ and ‘what should be represented’, perhaps echoing a separation between ‘what are seen’ and ‘what ought to be seen’ that goes back at least to Vincenzo Danti in the sixteenth century.32 What is further of note here in Pitfeild's translation is Perrault's claim that a drawing was approved by all the members present at the dissection before it was engraved. This implies that the veracity of the engraved figures had been guaranteed collectively.33 Memoir's for a natural history of animals thus represented in a smaller format a collectively guaranteed view of what an animal ought to look like, and such a view was certainly consonant with the early Royal Society's declaration that ‘in Assemblies, the Wits of most men are sharper, their Apprehensions readier, their Thoughts fuller than in their closets.’34
From the time during which Waller must have been working on the figures for Pitfeild's translation, there survives another image of the chameleon by him (figure 4). The inscription in gold ink on the horizontal branch of the tree of this watercolour sketch reads: ‘Richard Waller drew the image of the Egyptian Chameleon from the life [ad vivum] which the Honorable Robert Boyle kept, November 1686’. Though the phrase ‘ad vivum’ here must mean ‘from the life’, the composition of this figure resembles closely (although inverted) Le Clerc's engraving for Perrault (figure 3).35 Waller's drawing is different from Le Clerc's image of the chameleon in the position of one of the hindlegs and the presence of foliage on the branch, but the poses of the animal are very similar in the way in which the forelegs clasp each branch and the tail coils around another branch. If we take seriously the suggestion that images were to represent objects as they ‘should be’, Le Clerc's figure could be seen as serving as a template for Waller to represent another live specimen of the same species.36
Figure 4. ‘Hanc chamaeleonsis Aegyptiaci Iconem Delineabat R. Waller ad vivum quem possidebat Nob. R. Boyl. Nov: 1686.’ RSA, MS/131/3, 222 mm × 328 mm. (Copyright © The Royal Society.) (Online version in colour.)
A similar sense of a visual template may well have been behind the possible re-use of Hunt's plates that were originally designed for the Latin version of John Wilkins's Essay—plates that apparently included images of fishes and birds, most probably supplied by John Ray (FRS 1667) and Francis Willughby (FRS 1661).37 When the Society undertook to print Willughby's Historia piscium and realized that reliable images for some of the fishes were lacking, Hunt was asked to print off those figures for Wilkins's book to see whether any of them could be used.38 Such a request may well have been driven by financial and pragmatic concerns, but it may also be a sign that plates for a work by an esteemed (late) Fellow of the Society were acceptable as templates. It is not clear whether any of Hunt's plates for Wilkins were used, although we do know that Hunt helped out with the drawing, engraving and corrections of the plates of Historia piscium.39
It would be easy to dismiss Waller's frontispiece for Essayes as conventional and his images of Memoir's as slavish copying. They were certainly not images created anew from his own observations, but that would be to miss how Waller deftly gave visual expression to the Royal Society's quest for authority, and how he respected images produced through collective observation. His drawing of the chameleon and the possible use of Hunt's plates suggest how an image from another work could be copied as an authoritative template of what certain objects in nature should look like.
Images for Philosophical Transactions
Philosophical Transactions was the Society's journal that publicized the Society's investigations and interests, frequently accompanied by engravings. Quite a few of the original drawings for these engravings have survived, and these drawings offer an insight into the process through which illustrations were included in Philosophical Transactions.40
At the meeting of 25 February 1684/5:
A petition was read from one Robert Collinsone, a Scotchman, desiring to shew the Society a very large stone taken out of the bladder of one Francis Dugord of Auchen-home in Aberdeen, weighing 35 ounces and ¾, being in length 5 inches 9/10, diameter 3 6/10. The man, in whom it was bred, lived till he was fifty years old. It was delivered to Mr Hunt to make a draught of it.41
Hunt's drawing of this stone has survived (figure 5). He had written the following underneath the figure:
This prodigious gravell stone was cutt from Francis Dugud of Auchenhuife in the sheire of Aberdeine in Scotland soone after his death he dyded Anno 1675 aetis. suae. 48. This stone weighes: 32 ounces Troy weight and is in length 5 5/8 inches and in circumference 11 1/8 inches.42
Figure 5. Francis Duguid's bladder stone, drawn by Henry Hunt. RCP, MS 618/37r. (Copyright © Royal College of Physicians of London.) (Online version in colour.)
Hunt's entry differs from the details recorded in the minutes: Duguid died at 48 years of age according to Hunt, not 50; his bladder stone weighed 280 grains less; it was 11/40 inches shorter in length and 3/50 inches smaller in diameter.43 Three months later, this drawing was turned into an engraving (with left and right inverted) in Philosophical Transactions (no. 171), although the engraving was perhaps less successful in conveying the texture, encrustation and indentations of the original drawing. The full text accompanying the figure in Philosophical Transactions read:
The description of a Stone of the Bladder, seen by the Royal Society, Feb. 25th, 1684/5. This stone is represented Fig. I. and is said to be taken out of the Bladder of one Francis Dugood of Auchenhove in Aberdeen. The man, who bred it, lived till he was 50 years old: the length of it is 5 9/10 Inches; the Diameter 3 6/10; the weight two Pound, three Ounces, and six drams.44
This description follows the entry in the minutes rather than Hunt's notes in his drawing, although admittedly the differences in size and weight are fairly small. It may well be that the then secretary and editor of Philosophical Transactions, Francis Aston (FRS 1678), had a tendency to round off figures, as he also reported on another occasion that the same stone had weighed 36 ounces.45 This case suggests that Hunt's drawing carried authority more as a visual record of an object than for its textual description. It is important to note, therefore, that engravings in Philosophical Transactions were not necessarily faithful renderings of the original records, but rather that they reflected selections and interventions in the process of publication.
One of Waller's own articles in Philosophical Transactions serves to highlight a further point about the difference between engravings and the original drawings. In ‘Observations in the dissection of a paroquet’ (1694), Waller explained that he had dissected one of his pet parakeets that had died. Its tail feathers
are about two Inches long near the Quill of a Lemon-colour enclining to a green; next that a Scarlet for a pretty breadth, then a narrow Thread of green on some of them; after that a black and last of all ending in a light green. It were not an unworthy Curiosity to examine the colours of the Feathers of Birds and how the same individual branch of the stem of Feather, as here, comes to be tinged with such diversity of Colours ….46
Waller was of course not the first person to muse on the varied colours of a bird feather.47 His original drawing (figure 6) shows beautifully the colours he described, colours that were not replicated in Philosophical Transactions. Engravings did not necessarily subsume or replace all the information that the original drawing offered.
Figure 6. Original drawing by Waller for ‘Observations in the dissection of a paroquet’, RSA, Cl.P./15i/37. (Copyright © The Royal Society.)
It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find that a fine draughtsman such as Waller had been behind the earliest case of colour printing in Philosophical Transactions. In February 1685/6, the discussion of mineral colours for glass painting reminded Waller of a colour chart of his, which he duly presented at the next meeting to the Society.48 The next month, Waller showed another scheme of colours, ‘wherein by the mixtures of the several blacks and yellows (which he said, were principal colours) he had produced a series of shade of most colours imaginable’.49 This was the chart that was to be printed in Philosophical Transactions, and Waller designed a device for applying pigments:
It was by small taper pipes, which at the small end were stopt by plugs thrust on by spiral springs so as to keep the colours from running out; but when he intended to print, the plugs being thrust back by points standing out of them, the colour came down so as to make convenient round spots on the paper.50
Waller had been inspired by a similar colour chart (figure 7) in Nomenclatura et species colorum (1680) by Elias Brenner, who was employed by the Royal Academy of Antiquities in Sweden as a draughtsman.51 Brenner offered, for the use of miniaturists, a list of 30 ‘simple’ (that is, unmixed) colours arranged from white to black with their names in three languages (Latin, French and Swedish), with an actual sample of each colour.52 Waller's chart (figure 8), in contrast, showed both ‘simple’ and ‘mixed’ colours. It listed 7 simple ‘blue’ colours across the top, and 14 simple colours down the first left column, from ceruse (white lead), through five ‘yellows’ and eight ‘reds’ ending with dark, ‘lamp-black’. The colour terms were given in Latin and in English, and occasionally also in Greek and in French, although not every combination was given a name. Lowengard has pointed out that this chart combines Hooke's idea that all colours were derived from blue and red, and the Aristotelian tradition of colour as a combination of light and dark.53
Figure 7. Elias Brenner, ‘Nomenclatura trilinguis, et genuina specimina colorum simplicium’, from his Nomenclatura et species colorum (Stockholm, 1680). Kungliga biblioteket, Sweden, F1700.Fo.150. Figure 8. Richard Waller, ‘Tabula colorum physiologica tam mixtorum quam simplicium’, in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 16, 24–32 (1686). Blue bice (montanum) is the second colour from the left across the top row, and Cambodia (gutta gambae) the third down the first left-hand column. At the intersection of these two colours is ‘popinjay green’. From the copy that once belonged to Thomas Kirke (FRS 1693). (Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, 310.b.6A.8.)
Waller, furthermore, listed pigment material for simple colours from books of ancient authors and other Fellows.54 He hoped to offer with this chart a ‘standard of colours’, which he believed was wanting in philosophy.55 The chart showed, for example, that the colour popinjay green was made of ‘blue bice’ (made from malachites) and ‘cambodia’ (from the juice of a plant from the Indies) mixed in equal weights.56 Waller thus offered a way for others to reproduce colours in a standardized way. The study of colour in the Society in this period was mainly concerned with the practical problem of colouring in different media such as glass, marble, cloth or tempera.57 Mastery of such techniques was important for knowledge promoted by the Royal Society: the Baconian identification of operative and theoretical knowledge meant that a ‘true and perfect’ knowledge of a given quality in nature must enable the production of that quality in any material.58 Colour further interested the Society from the practical aspect of techniques for painting, staining and dyeing within the context of the history of trades.59 Waller's devising of the taper pipes and his emphasis on pigment material are indicative of this concern for the actual production of colours. Moreover, he would have been well aware of the ambivalence, felt especially by Hooke, as to the usefulness and effectiveness of prints.60 Waller's colour chart may thus be interpreted as an effort to compensate for a shortcoming of engravings as well as reflecting the ways in which the Society investigated colour in this period.
It seems that the Royal Society itself did not regard engravings in Philosophical Transactions as the final and authoritative image in matters of knowledge. On 18 January 1688 a microscopic drawing of a cochineal insect, drawn by Hunt three years earlier when it was submitted by Edward Tyson (FRS 1679), was recalled: ‘Mr Hunt was orderd to get Dr Tysons figures of the cochinell insect.’61 The drawing of the cochineal insect had been published in Philosophical Transactions, but that was not the image that the meeting decided to look up.62 This may well have had to do with the issue of colour, or perhaps a sense that the drawing was closer to the original object observed. Similarly, when James Douglas (FRS 1706) corrected Waller's description of the woodpecker's head at the meeting of 18 April 1717, he must have used the drawing, which is now among Douglas's papers.63 Drawings, even after they had been published in Philosophical Transactions, retained their significance to the Society as a source of knowledge. Such a practice should caution us from focusing exclusively on Philosophical Transactions and its engravings as being representative of the early Royal Society's use of images. Indeed, the surviving drawings by Hunt and Waller enable us to examine more broadly—beyond printed material—how images were used in the process of forming knowledge about nature.
Images for the meetings of the Society
The articles published in Philosophical Transactions had originally been read at the Society's meetings and had often been accompanied by objects or images, but only a small proportion of these drawings made it to publication. At the meetings, it was frequently decided that drawings should be made of the objects examined, even when the object itself was deposited in the Repository. At other times, it was ordered that copies should be taken of images that were brought to the meetings. Waller was one of the people who was asked to draw: on 25 November 1685, for example, after experiments on some volatile salt by Frederic Slare (FRS 1680), he was ‘desired to design the figure of the salt, as it appeared in the microscope.’64 It was Hunt, however, who was most frequently asked—he drew images of kidney stones, bladder stones, monstrous cats or puppies, conjoined twins, unidentified ancient figurines, birds, and so on.65 Intriguingly, Hunt is sometimes recorded as bringing back for approval a drawing ordered in a previous meeting (figure 9).66 Although it seems that drawings were not ordered primarily for the purpose of publication, any drawing that was ‘approved’ by the meeting might well be regarded as having a collective guarantee of its reliability and thus fit for future use or publication.
Figure 9. A drawing of ‘a monstrous pupie shewne to the Society May 1700’ by Hunt, which was ‘very well approved of’. RSA, MS/131/79. (Copyright © The Royal Society.)
Generated and scrutinized in the meetings, images were subject to an archiving process: some of them were kept with the original letters or papers, others were copied into the Journal Book or into the Register Book. In this sense, drawings were treated no differently from the textual descriptions and verbal reports examined at the regular meetings of the Society.67 In addition, several drawings were sent either to the Library or the Repository. In the case of the image of a Swiss Hussar who was 8½ feet tall, brought in by John van de Bemde (FRS 1678–1711) in 1705, Hunt was ‘desired to take a copy of it’ and, once he had done so, ‘was desired to place it in the Repository among the other things of that nature.’68 ‘The other things of that nature’ might refer to the subject matter depicted, or to the medium of drawing. A little later, in 1708, Francis Hauksbee (FRS 1705) showed two girls joined at the breast, and ‘a draught of them was ordered to be put in the Repository’, and when Hunt showed his draught at the following meeting, it was ‘order'd to be put into the Societie's book of drawings.’69 In other instances, pictures were sent to the Library, to be inserted into books. The prints of water birds presented by Andreas Arnold of Nuremberg, for example, ‘were ordered to be kept in the library with Mr Willughby's Ornithologia.’70 The copy of Willughby's Ornithology (1678) in the Royal Society Library still contains engravings of these Nuremberg water birds as well as some other drawings, which is an indication that a past Fellow's book had become the reference book on a particular topic, to be augmented and updated. Depositing pictures in the Repository or the Library made sense, because many were drawings of objects, and there were several books in the Library that contained images of similar objects. These pictures were kept in various places in the Society with the expectation of being retrieved later for further examination—for example, Hunt's figure of a swordfish, first shown at the meeting on 17 October 1694, was brought in again on 18 November 1702.71 Images thus formed part of a retrievable store of knowledge alongside texts in the archives, objects in the Repository and books in the Library.72
Not every drawing submitted or ordered at meetings was immediately retained, however. This was the case with Waller's plant studies. He had initially suggested to John Ray a pictorial version of the morphological tabulation that Ray had given in his Historia plantarum so that ‘one wholly ignorant in plants may know how to find any unknown plant.’73 Waller reported to the meeting that Ray had disapproved of such a scheme, as ‘a matter of too much Difficulty’.74 This seems to have prompted Waller to study plants more closely and he began drawing plants in watercolour, which were shown first to Hooke and then to a meeting in 1691.75 Waller submitted to the meeting in 1692 his pictorial table of differences in English plant species, which he hoped to improve upon further.76 This table seems never to have been completed or presented to the Society, despite the fact that a copy was requested.77 Waller showed his drawings of plants again, on 11 June 1713, where it was recorded that he
shewed several Draughts of Grasses and some other common wild Plants, which he had drawn in Water Colours by the life, of the natural size: In the Grasses one part, viz as much as belonged to the Production of one Grain or seed was represented as seen by the microscope.78
Waller thus seems to have kept and studied his drawings of plants, over a period. The Society now possesses a collection of fine watercolours of common English plants by Waller, some of them indeed accompanied by a microscopic view of the cross section of a seed, although it is uncertain whether these watercolours were deposited with the Society during Waller's lifetime.79
Apart from drawings that were seen or recorded ‘officially’ at the meetings, there seem to be a few others that were made more informally. At the meeting of 31 May 1711,
Dr Sloane produced a letter from a person in Lancashire, with some Cyrstalls found at Downham, a village in that County, thence called Downham Diamonds. They are found thrown up with the loose earth by the moles. They are particularly observed hexangular to a solid Angle of six triangular plains at both ends, having no place where they were ever fastened to any Rock or Stone.80
There was no specific order to have its image drawn, but inserted with the original draft minutes is a pen drawing of this ‘Downham crystal’, in which Waller captures beautifully the shadow cast through the crystal itself (figure 10). The date of the image, 28 June 1711, suggests that Waller was allowed to keep the object for some time to draw it. Such drawings indicate an active interest in capturing visually the weekly deliberations of the Society.
Figure 10. ‘Cristallus Downamensis’, drawn by Richard Waller, 28 June 1711, RSA, MS/562. (Copyright © The Royal Society.)
Alongside texts, objects and books, images thus aided the acquisition, storage, re-examination and development of knowledge about nature. Hunt's submission of his drawings for approval at meetings hints at a collective process of authorization, and Waller's drawings indicate uses of images beyond what was formally requested or recorded at the Society's meetings. Although the Society's ‘Book of Drawings’ has not survived, it is noteworthy that images were collected in some form, but probably not on the scale of the ‘paper museum’ of Cassiano dal Pozzo, known to Fellows such as John Evelyn (FRS 1663) and Philip Skippon (FRS 1667).81 It confirms that images had a substantial role in the regular meetings of the Royal Society.
Conclusion
It would be misleading to conclude that Waller's contribution to the Society's activities was limited to the pictorial; as Secretary, he wrote up minutes, managed the Society's correspondence and edited Philosophical Transactions; he also donated objects and books.82 Hunt, too, was involved in other activities, performing experiments, measuring rainfall, weighing objects, drawing up lists of objects and books, and relaying papers and letters to the secretaries. Nevertheless, Waller and Hunt were the two key people who created various images for the Society, and their drawings show how images were used for expressing a corporate identity, disseminating knowledge through publications, and developing knowledge about nature in the weekly meetings.
Although in this paper I have described how both Waller and Hunt contributed pictorially to the activities of the early Society, it would be remiss not to remark on the differences between the two. Waller was a Fellow, Hunt not. Waller's status as Fellow meant that his image-making efforts tended to be acknowledged explicitly by other Fellows, and his draughtsmanship was marked in publications, whereas Hunt's name was hardly ever visible in the Society's publications, although he signed his drawings. It is perhaps not that surprising that Hunt's name became invisible through the collective approval of his drawings in the meetings and in the process of publications, as he was, after all, paid by the Society to do the work.83 However, Hunt's public and historical invisibility should not be an excuse for historians to ignore his pictorial contributions to the activities of the Society.
Singling out Waller as a Fellow who could draw would also be misleading. He was certainly not the only Fellow who was proficient in drawing—Hooke had apprenticed with Peter Lely and had drawn the images of his Micrographia.84 Hooke, furthermore, used draughts and models extensively to enable ready visualization and construction of complex material structures.85 John Evelyn could draw and etch, and Christopher Wren is known for his architectural drawings (although he had a team of assistant draughtsmen) as well as for his figures in Thomas Willis's De cerebri anatome (1664).86 Alongside the contributions of Waller and Hunt, we can thus detect in the Royal Society a wider use of drawings and images in the service of knowledge.87 It would be too rash to claim, however, that these drawings mark the beginning of ‘scientific illustrations’ as distinct and separate from ‘artistic’ images.88 It is well known, for example, that an active use of drawings in pursuit of knowledge in the Society was accompanied by an intense interest in connoisseurship in the fine arts by Fellows such as Evelyn, Thomas Povey (FRS 1663) and William Aglionby (FRS 1667).89 It is for future research to determine how cultivation of connoisseurship and training of the ‘eye’ of the virtuoso related to the use of his own ‘hand’ in drawing.
There are many things that the Royal Society no longer possesses, namely most of the objects from its Repository, several printed books, manuscripts and drawings from its Library, as well as all the plates for Philosophical Transactions, including Hunt's plates for Wilkins's Real character.90 Nevertheless, what has survived of the pictorial record of the Society enables us to appreciate better how visual resources became integral to the activities of the Royal Society. In publications for the Royal Society, pictures were used to express institutional ideals as well as current research interests and findings, but printed images were not the only type of visual resource used by the Society. The Society's weekly meetings actively used drawings—drawings that were collectively approved, stored, retrieved and re-examined alongside texts, books and objects. Both Waller and Hunt contributed significantly to the process of integrating pictorial resources into the Royal Society's activities.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the help I received at the Royal Society Library, from Keith Moore, Joanna Hopkins, Joanna Corden and Rupert Baker. I am particularly indebted to Felicity Henderson for her generous help and expert advice. This paper benefited from the wisdom of Frances Willmoth, Michael Hunter, Robert Fox and the anonymous referees for this journal.
Footnotes
Notes
2 The seminal work in this area was M. Rudwick, ‘The emergence of a visual language for geological science 1740–1840’, Hist. Sci. 14, 149–195 (1976). Recent works that use visual sources powerfully to understand the ideals and practices of past science are D. Freedberg, The eye of the lynx: Galileo, his friends and the beginnings of modern natural history (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and L. Daston and P. Galison, Objectivity (Zone, New York, 2007).
3 For the limited inference possible from naturalistic images, see M. Kemp, ‘Taking it on trust: form and meaning in naturalistic representation’, Arch. Nat. Hist. 17, 127–188 (1990). For the complexity involved in observational practices, see L. Daston and E. Lunbeck (eds), Histories of scientific observation (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
4 T. Birch, The history of the Royal Society of London (printed for A. Millar, London, 1756–1757) (hereafter abbreviated as Birch). Other abbreviations used hereafter: RCP, Royal College of Physicians; RSA, Royal Society Archives; TNA, The National Archives.
5 For Waller, I am indebted to M. J. M. Ezell, ‘Richard Waller, S.R.S.: “In pursuit of nature”’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 38, 215–233 (1984).
6 M. J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch's wife (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), pp. 147–148. Mary Moore (d. 1716, TNA, PROB 11/554) was the daughter of a citizen and grocer of London, Anthony Tyther. Her first husband, Richard Waller, must have died before October 1663, when she remarried Francis Moore; G. E. Cokayne and E. A. Fry, Calendar of marriage licenses issued by the Faculty Office, 1632–1714 (British Record Society, London, 1905), p. 28.
7 Hooke read Moore's tract on women's rights; R. T. Gunther, Early science in Oxford, vol. 10 (The life and work of Robert Hooke (part IV)) (R. T. Gunther, Oxford, 1935), p. 219; Ezell, op. cit. (note 6), pp. 147–149.
8 R. K. Bluhm, ‘Remarks on the Royal Society's finances 1660–1768’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 13, 82–108 (1958), at p. 98.
9 TNA, PROB 11/546. The provision for the Wallerian Lecture was later revoked in a codicil at his wife's request. None of Waller's children survived him or his wife, and his estate passed to his brother-in-law, Jonathan Blackwell (FRS 1692), for whose descendants see note 79 below.
10 H. W. Robinson, ‘The administrative staff of the Royal Society, 1663–1861’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 4, 193–205 (1946), at p. 197.
13 William Urwick, Nonconformity in Herts (Hazell, London, 1884), pp. 658–659. For their elder brothers, see N. H. Keeble, ‘James Janeway (1636–74)’ and Stephen Wright, ‘John Janeway (1633–57)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) (accessed 5 October 2010).
14 Hunt knew Stephen Gray from Canterbury, according to L. Murdin, Under Newton's shadow: astronomical practices in the seventeenth century (Hilger, Bristol, 1985), p. 30. I thank Frances Willmoth for drawing my attention to this work.
15 Janeway was married by Tillotson; A W. Hughes Clarke, The register of St Lawrence Jewry London 1677–1812 (Harleian Society, London, 1941), p. 95.
16 RSA, RBO/11/374. Jonathan Nunn was Hunt's son-in-law and executor. Tillotson was the executor of Wilkins's will. Benjamin Janeway is most probably the youngest child of William Janeway.
17 For the fate of the Latin edition, see R. Lewis, ‘The publication of John Wilkins's “Essay” (1668): some contextual considerations’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 56, 133–146 (2002), n. 36.
18 R. Hooke, Diary, 1672–1680 (ed. H. W. Robinson and W. Adams) (Taylor & Francis, London, 1935), pp. 68, 90, 134, 138, 176–178 and 158.
22 For this context, see L. Boschiero, ‘Translation, experimentation and the spring of the air: Richard Waller's Essayes of Natural Experiments’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 64, 67–83 (2009). The translation was suggested to Waller by Sir John Hoskins; Ezell, op. cit. (note 5), at p. 219.
23 The crest held by the Accademia del Cimento shows an emblem of a furnace and three vessels for cupellation with the motto ‘provando e riprovando’ adorning the original title page, for which see D. Bertoloni Meli, ‘Authorship and teamwork around the Cimento Academy: mathematics, anatomy, experimental philosophy’, Early Sci. Med. 6, 65–94 (2001), at pp. 88–90.
24 See for example, V. R. Remmert, ‘“Docet parva pictura, quod multae scripturae non dicunt.” Frontispieces, their functions, and their audiences in seventeenth-century mathematical sciences’, in Transmitting knowledge: words, images, and instruments in early modern Europe (ed. S. Kusukawa and I. Maclean), pp. 239–270 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
26 A. Guerrini, ‘The king's animals and the king's books: the illustrations of the Paris Academy's Histoire des animaux’, Ann. Sci. 67, 383–404 (2010), at pp. 389–390.
29 Pitfeild, op. cit. (note 28), [b3]r; C. Perrault, Memoires pour servir a l'histoire naturelle des animaux (Imprimerie royale, Paris, 1671), [õ]v.
31 For example, see S. Kusukawa, ‘Uses of pictures in printed books: the case of Clusius's Exoticorum libri decem’, in Carolus Clusius (ed. P. Hoftijzer and R. Visser), pp. 221–246 (Edita KNAW, Amsterdam, 2007), at p. 226; and Daston and Galison, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 84–98, for later examples.
32 ‘The difference … between imitation and il ritrarre [simple copying] will be that the latter presents things perfectly as they are seen and the other perfectly as they ought to be seen.’ V. Danti, Il primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni (Torrentino, Florence, 1567), p. 60, as translated in J. S. Ackerman, Origins, imitation, conventions (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002), p. 134.
33 For the authenticating role of images for praeternatural objects later, see P. Fontes da Costa, ‘The making of extraordinary facts: authentication of singularities of nature at the Royal Society of London in the first half of the eighteenth century’, Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 33, 265–288 (2002).
34 T. Sprat, The history of the Royal Society of London for the improving of natural knowledge (T. R. for J. Martyn, London, 1667), p. 98. I thank Michael Hunter for drawing my attention to this passage.
35 For this phrase, see C. Swan, ‘“Ad vivum, naer het leven”, from the life: considerations on a mode of representation’, Word & Image 11, 353–372 (1995).
36 The supreme example of a visual template of an animal is Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of the rhinoceros, T. H. Clarke, The rhinoceros from Dürer to Stubbs 1515–1799 (Sotheby's, London, 1986). See also Conrad Gessner's figures as templates in K. Acheson, ‘Gesner, Topsell, and the purposes of pictures in early modern natural histories’, in Printed images in early modern Britain: essays in interpretation (ed. M. Hunter), pp. 127–144 (Ashgate, Farnham, 2010).
37 S. Kusukawa, ‘The Historia Piscium (1686)’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 54, 179–197 (2000), at pp. 185–186 and 191. For these images as including trees, birds, beasts and fishes, see Lewis, op. cit. (note 17), n. 36. RSA, JBC/7/74: Hunt reported in 1688 that 28 of the 200 plates designed by Wilkins had been engraved.
40 At present, there is no systematic list that cross-references the illustrations in Philosophical Transactions with the original drawings that have survived in the Royal Society archives and elsewhere. With the support of a summer studentship from Trinity College, Cambridge (2009), Ms Sonya Milanova compiled a preliminary list for the figures of Philosophical Transactions (issues 143 to 304). This has been deposited with the Royal Society Library. Megan Doherty worked on, inter alia, illustrations of Philosophical Transactions from the Oldenburg years.
43 32 Troy ounces = 15 360 grains; 35¾ ounces (avoirdupois) = 15 640 grains. A circumference of 11 1/8 inches tallies with a diameter of roughly 3.54 inches.
44 ‘The Description of a Stone of the Bladder, Seen by the Royal Society, Feb. 25th, 1684/5’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 15, 1015.
45 ‘A Scotchman brought us a stone cut out of a man's bladder weighing 36 ounces: we have ordered to make a model of it.’ Aston to Musgrave, 26 February 1684; T. Gunther, Early science in Oxford, vol. 12 (Dr Plot and the correspondence of the philosophical society of Oxford) (R. T. Gunther, Oxford, 1939), p. 82.
46 R. Waller, ‘Observations in the Dissection of a Paroquet, Made and Communicated to the Royal Society by Mr. Rich. Waller’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 18, 153–157 (1694), at p. 154.
47 See, for example, F. de Aguilon, Opticorum libri sex (Ex officina Plantiniana, Antwerp, 1613), p. 43, and R. Hooke, Micrographia (J. Martyn and J. Allestry, London, 1665), pp. 167–169.
51 Waller refers to Brenner's chart in ‘A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours, with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt to Its Proper Name: By R. Waller, Fellow of the Royal Society’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 16, 24–32 (1686), at p. 29. Brenner (1647–1717) learnt drawing and numismatics from Johannes Schefferus; A. Ellenius, ‘Johannes Schefferus and Swedish antiquity’, J. Warburg Courtauld Insts. 20, 59–74 (1957), at p. 66. Cf. RSA, JBC/8/210 (Brenner's gift of his book on coins).
52 H. Reijonen, ‘Elias Brenner: miniatyyrimaalausperinteen edustajana’, Suomen Mus. 108, 5–26 (2001). I thank Sami Uljas for translating this article for me.
53 Sara Lowengard, ‘Number, order, form’, in The creation of color in eighteenth-century Europe, ch. 3 (2006); see http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard/index.html (accessed 16 December 2009).
54 Waller referred to Pliny the Elder, Natural History; Dioscorides, De materia medica; C. Merret, The art of glass (translation of A. Neri's L'arte vetraria distinta in libri sette); W. Charleton, ‘De variis fossilium generibus’, included in his Onomasticon Zoicon; R. Boyle, Experiments and considerations touching colours; R. Plott, The natural history of Oxfordshire.
55 R. Waller, ‘A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours, with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt to Its Proper Name: By R. Waller, Fellow of the Royal Society’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 16, 24–32 (1686), at p. 25. Cf. Newton's incorporation of pigment and artistic terms in the presentation of his theory; A. E. Shapiro, ‘Artists’ colors and Newton's colors’, Isis 85, 600–630 (1994).
58 F. Bacon, The Instauratio magna, part II (Novum organum and associated texts) (ed. G. Rees and M. Wakely) (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004), pp. 201–203.
59 For the interest in painting, prints, and pigment in the context of the History of Trades and virtuosity, see C. A. Hanson, The English virtuoso: art, medicine, and antiquarianism in the age of empiricism (University of Chicago Press, 2009), chs 2 and 3. For the limited impact of Newtonian colour theory on the practice of painters, see M. Kemp, The science of art: optical themes in Western art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990), pp. 285–292, and J. Gage, ‘Signs of disharmony: Newton's Opticks and the artists’, Perspect. Sci. 16, 360–377 (2008).
60 Matthew Hunter, ‘The theory of the impression according to Robert Hooke’, in Printed images in early modern Britain: essays in interpretation (ed. M. Hunter), pp. 167–190 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2010).
62 ‘An Explanation of the Figures of Several Antiquities, Communicated by a Member of the Royal Society’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 15, 1201–1202 (1685), at p. 1202.
63 RSA JBO/12/164. Waller's drawing is now in the Library of the University of Glasgow (MS Hunter, D 507a), among the Douglas papers, for which see K. B. Thomas, James Douglas of the pouch and his pupil William Hunter (Pitman, London, 1964).
65 Note that the objects drawn by Hunt were not limited to natural historical or medical objects; see, for example, RSA, MS 131/135 (Lowthorp's instrument to measure refraction).
67 For the archiving process, see M. Feingold, ‘Of records and grandeur: the archive of the Royal Society’, in Archives of the scientific revolution: the formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe (ed. M. Hunter), pp. 171–184 (Boydell, Woodbridge, 1998).
70 Birch, vol. 4, p. 163. The prints may be identified as no. 190 in Zoologische Einblattdrucke und Flugschriften vor 1800 (ed. I. Faust and K. Barthelmess), vol. 1 (Hiersemann, Stuttgart, 1998), pp. 70–71; for Arnold's connection with the Royal Society, see F. Blom, Christoph and Andreas Arnold and England (Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen, 1981), p. 82.
72 For the formation of the Repository, see Michael Hunter, ‘Between cabinet of curiosities and research collection: the history of the Royal Society's “Repository”’, in his Establishing the new science, pp. 122–155 (Boydell, Woodbridge, 1989).
73 Richard Waller to John Ray; W. Derham, Philosophical letters (W. and J. Innys, London, 1718), pp. 211–212.
79 RSA, MS/131/4–47. When Waller's library went on sale in 1839 as part of the library of one of his descendants, George Graham Blackwell, it contained an entry, ‘Waller's herbal’: Ampney Park, near Cirencester, to be sold by auction by Mr. Jeffries, at the King's Head, Cirencester, … the whole of the valuable and extensive library, consisting of upwards of 3000 volumes, the property of the late G. G. Blackwell, esquire, deceased (J. Bravender, Cirencester, 1839), p. 4, no. 21.
80 RSA, JBO/11/225. This object is recorded in Sloane's catalogue of his collection, now in the Natural History Museum (vol. III B, minerals, vol. 280, no. 540), but it has not been possible to identify it among the original Sloane collection. I thank Peter Tandy and Martha Fleming at the Natural History Museum for their assistance.
82 For Waller's gift of reindeer, see Birch, vol. 4, p. 223; RSA, JBC/9/64. Not all books presented by Waller to the Royal Society Library have survived, but still extant are Jacques Dalechamps's commentary on the Pliny the Elder's Historiae mundi libri xxxvii (Lyon, 1587), and T. Blebelius, De sphaera (Helmstadt, 1588).
83 See, for example, RSA, JBC/7/281, JBC/8/255, JBC/9/20, 220 and 242. For Boyle's invisible technicians, see S. Shapin, A social history of truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century England (University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 8; S. Pumfrey, ‘Who did the work? Experimental philosophers and public demonstrators in Augustan England’, Br. J. Hist. Sci. 28, 131–156 (1995), at p. 142 (for Hunt).
84 R. Hooke, Posthumous works (S. Smith and B. Walford, London, 1705), pp. ii–iii. For Hooke's drawings, see J. Neri, ‘Between observation and image: representations of insects in Robert Hooke's Micrographia’, in The art of natural history: illustrated treatises and botanical paintings, 1400–1850 (ed. T. O'Malley and A. R. W. Meyers), pp. 82–107 (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2008); M. C. Hunter, ‘Hooke's figurations: a figural drawing attributed to Robert Hooke’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 64, 251–260 (2010); and RCP MS 618/3r–5r, 56r.
85 R. Iliffe, ‘Material doubts: Hooke, artisan culture and the exchange of information in 1670s London’, Br. J. Hist. Sci. 28, 285–318 (1995).
86 A. Griffiths, ‘The etchings of John Evelyn’, in Art and patronage in the Caroline courts (ed. D. Howarth), pp. 51–67 (Cambridge University Press, 1993); A. Geraghty, The architectural drawings of Sir Christopher Wren at All Souls College, Oxford (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007), pp. 10–13. Only one anatomical drawing by Wren survives; see A. Neher, ‘Christopher Wren, Thomas Willis and the depiction of the brain and nerves’, J. Med. Hum. 30, 191–200 (2009), ill. 1.
87 Cf. the idea of the drawings in the Royal Society as ‘handmaiden to scientific truth’: A. Bermingham, Learning to draw: studies in the cultural history of a polite and useful art (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2000), p. 71.
89 For the difficulty of drawing the distinction between artistic and scientific images in this period, see C. Gibson-Wood, ‘Classification and value in a seventeenth-century museum’, J. Hist. Collect. 9, 61–77 (1997). I thank Michael Hunter for drawing my attention to this article. For the inappropriateness of the term ‘scientific illustration’ for this period, see R. Baldasso, ‘The role of visual representation in the Scientific Revolution: a historiographic inquiry’, Centaurus 48, 69–88 (2006).
