Читать книгу Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities - Lewis Pyenson - Страница 11

Above the deafening cacophony of a dozen screaming four-year-olds, a daycare teacher admonishes, ‘Now share!’ The concept of sharing a toy – of sacrificing individual possession for a communal experience, of deferring pleasure until others have taken a turn at gratification – is altogether foreign to the toddler, whose universe heretofore has been entirely self-centred and unabashedly selfish. It is seen as an important measure of maturity when the child is able to transcend the universe of ‘me and mine’, and to begin to entertain the idea of a greater social imperative.

The development of science seems to recapitulate the odyssey of every individual as he matures from infantile egotism to participation in the universe of social give-and-take. In the ancient and medieval worlds, learning about the natural world proceeded by fits and starts. People recorded intriguing theories and thoughts, constructed ingenious mechanisms and monuments, and even established schools. There existed, however, no special notion of a common mission to uncover new truths about nature, no clear idea that a division of labour could prove especially conducive to the rapid accumulation of knowledge. Earlier thinkers tended to guard and keep secret what they knew, fearing that good ideas might be stolen by a rival.

With the Scientific Revolution of the mid seventeenth century, the cultivation of natural knowledge ceased to be solitary and introspective; it became shared and communal. By working together, according to this new outlook, philosophers could accomplish more than they could by working separately; the cumulation of individual efforts by sharing would result in more gains to science than the summing of its isolated parts. Furthermore, what contemporaries labelled the ‘new science’ – signified by a corporate or composite effort – also aimed to replace words with deeds, the library with the laboratory, and systems with facts. This emphasis on activism, experiment, and experience stimulated the establishment of scientific societies, special associations where individuals could congregate and cooperate in advancing the new science.¹ In this chapter we examine the anatomy of the new societies.

These institutions for sharing became the dominating and distinguishing feature of science during the second half of the seventeenth century. Scientific societies were an essential component, not a mere by-product, of the Scientific Revolution. They became a vital instrument for formulating and transmitting scientific norms and values. They transcended the pedagogical tradition associated with universities and established a new routine, inspired by everyday circumstances. Scientific societies held meetings at regular intervals; they elected officers and set up committees. Such daily activity led to the establishment of ‘a seasonal calendar of ritual: the first formal meeting of the year, periods of election, ordinary meetings, breaks for religious and state holidays, public meetings, vacation’ and so forth.² Scientific societies may have exalted the tedious and the dull, but they enshrined a secular calendar for these mundane affairs – an essential figure of modernity. In other words, time was organized without the traditional appeal to sacred celebrations or agricultural cycles.

What led natural philosophers to embrace a new ideology associated with sharing? Certainly they did not think that invention would cease to be the fruit of one mind and would become a collective procedure. They were, after all, proud of their own discoveries. Rather, they saw advantages to associating with a group of like-minded people. The form of their association departed from medieval guilds. Associations for promoting the new science ignored matters of faith and livelihood. Nor did scientific associations seek to train apprentices. They were an avocational service club – the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Odd Fellows or Rotarians.

The learned society or academy of the seventeenth century incited and rewarded independent work. It also provided an avenue for communicating the results of scientific investigations, at first by means of the private correspondence of a secretary, and later through formal minutes and journals. Scientific societies housed books in their libraries, displayed specimens in their museums, and collected instruments in their cabinets, all these services assisting the investigations of individual members. Groups were naturally better able to purchase the costly tools required by the new science, whether telescopes, microscopes, or burning-mirrors. In this way, scientific societies made the materiel for conducting science accessible in a convenient and relatively inexpensive form. By the end of the seventeenth century, any man of scientific reputation and accomplishment belonged to a learned society or academy.

Nascent scientific organizations fulfilled less obvious functions, as well. Just to be associated with these enterprises conferred prestige on a member. This has been true virtually from the beginning, and ‘FRS’ (Fellow of the Royal Society of London) or ‘membre de l’Institut’ (member of one of the national academies of France) is today a coveted designation. In addition to this honorific function, periodic meetings of societies provided a forum for individuals to meet and discuss their work. Universities had no real place for the exchange of ideas among equals (there were neither faculty clubs nor professorial offices), but in the halls of the academy, controversies could be aired, alliances forged, and criticisms vetted.

Whence the notion for these associations? Some of them found inspiration in an invocation of Platonic free assembly and corporate activity, beyond political control. Others looked back to the Renaissance, when learned men came together under the influence of a particular patron or court. Yet, as we shall see, the Royal Society of London represented a novel departure: For the first time, individuals united together in a public body dedicated to the corporate prosecution of scientific research.

Engines of the Scientific Revolution

The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, promoted ‘a cluster of disciplines concerned with natural and mechanical phenomena to the exclusion of others, linked by common methods’. It aimed to advance the realms of natural philosophy and natural history (roughly equivalent to our physical and biological sciences), and distanced itself from discussions of theology or scholastic philosophy, which it perceived as sterile. The Society’s devotion to the production of knowledge, rather than to its dissemination, sets it apart from other contemporary institutions. Its importance and prestige was confirmed by royal incorporation at the hand of Charles II.³

Sir Francis Bacon, a lawyer and chancellor to James I, became the patron saint of the Royal Society and of many other scientific societies as well. Bacon’s scientific contributions were unremarkable, but he enjoyed tremendous posthumous influence as the principal polemicist for the new science. In the New Atlantis (1627), he called for the creation of research institutions to accommodate the new learning. There he described ‘Salomon’s House’ – a collaborative effort dedicated to ‘the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. Bacon maintained that only by combining the efforts of individuals could humankind hope to tackle the enormous range of questions that should be raised about the natural world. This programme formed one of the components of his projected Great Instauration, a work incomplete at the time of his death, and it complemented the inductive approach sketched in his New Organon (1620).⁴

Baconian ideology infused the creation and early years of the Royal Society. As the Society’s apologist Thomas Sprat put it, Bacon’s writings contained ‘the best Arguments, that can be produced for the Defence of experimental Philosophy, and the best Directions, that are needful to promote it’. Bacon’s views not only permeated Sprat’s official History of the Royal Society (first published in 1667), but they also found expression in the Society’s charters, diffusion in the Philosophical Transactions, and reiteration in the writings of fellows like Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and John Evelyn (1620–1706). Baconianism so well reflected the motivations of diverse associations of scientifically inclined amateurs in England that historians still try to identify the group that led directly into the creation of the Royal Society. Depending on which historian’s arguments one believes, the Royal Society may be traced to a gathering of gentlemen associated with Gresham College in London, to a less pragmatic network of London philosophers and social reformers, or to a collection of natural philosophers who eventually came to reside in Oxford.

The first of these, Gresham College, had been founded in 1597 by a legacy of the London merchant Sir Thomas Gresham to provide a series of educational lectures on a variety of topics for the local townspeople. Gresham also established resident professorships in astronomy, geometry, and medicine. His former townhouse provided a natural meeting place for scientifically inclined men, including sometime lecturers Robert Hooke (1635–1702), Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and Isaac Barrow (1630–1677).

A second London group of Puritans and Parliamentarians, who flourished during the 1640s and 1650s, was attracted by the millenarian zeal exuded by Continental collaborators Jan Comenius (1592–1670), Samuel Hartlib (d. 1662), and Theodore Haak (1605–1690). John Dury (1596–1680), William Petty (1623–1687), and John Evelyn numbered among the reformers who viewed the association of scientists in a scheme by Hartlib for an ‘Office of Address’ as a mechanism for practical improvement and social advancement. The ‘office’, motivated by Protestant fervour, collected information about utilitarian discoveries and inventions.

Still another group – including Seth Ward (1617–1689), Thomas Willis (1621–1675), and William Petty – went up to Oxford from London because their mentor John Wilkins (1614–1672) had assumed the wardenship of Wadham College. Wilkins, brother-in-law to Oliver Cromwell, made the remarkable transition from Puritan divine to Anglican bishop. His followers were part of the Royalist exodus from London (and Gresham College) that had occurred during the upheaval of the Commonwealth period, when the Puritans assumed the reins of government. Robert Boyle’s move to Oxford attracted others to the quiet college town, including architect Christopher Wren and experimenter Robert Hooke. This small group of natural philosophers organized weekly meetings to perform and conduct experiments. Some scholars contend that this was the incipient Royal Society – an association that had existed as an ‘invisible college’ under the Puritans and even previously during the reign of Charles I.

Whatever its historical antecedents, the creation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was assured when twelve men of diverse backgrounds – from Royalist to Cromwellian – gathered at Gresham College during the early days of the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660. They resolved to meet weekly to discuss and advance natural philosophy. Two years later, Charles II granted the group a royal charter. A second charter of 1663 established the operating rules and procedures of the Society. These actions bestowed upon the group of 115 scientific virtuosi a corporate status comparable to the one enjoyed by lawyers in the Inns of Court and by medical doctors in the College of Physicians. The incorporation of the Society itself meant that it could own property, employ officers, possess a seal and coat of arms, and license its own books.⁵ These were significant legal privileges at the time.

In his book The Great Instauration (1975), Charles Webster suggests that questions about the Royal Society’s origins and true character can be resolved by determining the Society’s active members. Webster identified twelve fellows – among them Boyle, Evelyn, Petty, and Wren – whose activity dominated and sustained the fledgling Society during its first two and a half years. Webster concludes that preliminary meetings were held in London during the closing years of Cromwell’s republic and that ‘diversity of outlook and experience’ brought a remarkable advantage to the group. He contends that it is ‘superfluous’ to ask whether the nucleus was Puritan or Anglican, Parliamentarian or Royalist. The early Society evolved continually in terms of its composition and interests, just as religious beliefs and political convictions fluctuated beyond its confines.

The diverse religious and political composition of the Royal Society set a premium on limiting activity to natural philosophy. The exploration of experimental and mathematical problems concentrated the energies of early fellows and minimized more fundamental differences of opinion. In this way, the Society’s work remained unaffected by the collapse of Cromwell’s republic and the restoration of the monarchy. In Webster’s words, ‘scientific work was insulated from ideological friction’. Science, according to this view, is an anodyne for social dislocation.

The Royal Society dedicated itself to ‘the advancement of the knowledge of natural things and useful arts by experiments, to the glory of God the creator and for application to the good of mankind’. It was governed by a president and a council of twenty-one fellows, from whose ranks were elected a treasurer and two secretaries. The Society employed at least two Curators of Experiments, obtained the cadavers of criminals for anatomical demonstrations, and built quarters for its assemblies in London. Fellows had to be elected by the general membership and upon election had to pay an admission fee, in addition to an annual subscription.

Although the Royal Society may be considered an organization that rewards the achievements of a scientific elite, its membership down from the early days has been relatively large, especially when compared with the size of other national scientific organizations. From its inception, the Society included a large proportion of virtuosi from the leisured classes, men whose interests have encompassed historical, literary, artistic, and archaeological studies. To the more avid scientific practitioners in the Society, the concerns of this element (who were needed for their wealth and social status) appeared aimless, unfocused, and obscure. The virtuosi also gave the Society a tendency to devolve into a social club for gentlemen. (When this current took hold in the Society during the early nineteenth century, it was ironically a member of the aristocracy, the duke of Sussex, son of George III, who reformed the Society and restored its learned purpose.)

Historian of science Marie Boas Hall has recently shifted attention from the organization’s origins and sociological composition to what actually occurred at its meetings. She has been particularly interested in the extent to which experiments were performed by the Society’s paid employees, both curators and operators, during its early years. Empirical discussions and demonstrations of experimental results seemed to offer a respite from potentially divisive political or religious issues. The airing of hypotheses, says Boas Hall, in contrast, led to ‘disputes and wranglings’ inappropriate to a ‘quiet atmosphere of learned debate’.

Boas Hall concludes that although the early Society paid lip-service to the promotion of ‘Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’, early enthusiasm soon gave way to the mere reading of papers and discussion about experiment. Although a small core of virtuosi maintained interest in the demonstration of experimental phenomena by operators (the title is significant) like Robert Hooke, most fellows sensed that the descriptions of experiments in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions possessed more enduring value than demonstrations. In the words of A. Rupert Hall, the Royal Society became ‘a place of report rather than a research institute’. Rhetoric and the prestige that flowed from association with eminent names like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle nevertheless ensured that contemporaries and historians alike have linked the Royal Society with the new experimental philosophy.⁶

The early Royal Society’s fulfilment of the Baconian imperative depended entirely on individual initiative, whether Operator Robert Hooke’s enthusiasm for performing experiments or Secretary Henry Oldenburg’s (ca.1618–1677) prosecution of the plan for creating a universal natural history. Oldenburg’s zeal for the task led to the publication of some ‘histories’ (more properly, narratives) of trades in the Philosophical Transactions. These experiential accounts derived from Oldenburg’s queries addressed on a regular basis to correspondents all over the world; by 1668, the annual volume of incoming and outgoing letters supervised by Oldenburg generally exceeded 300. James McClellan characterizes the Royal Society as encouraging ‘a vaguely defined Baconian empiricism that meshed well with the format of its meetings and the looser interests of its members’. He also sees the outward turn away from a dedicated Baconian core as the mechanism that propelled the Society to become the most important learned society of the second half of the seventeenth century.⁷

Part of the Royal Society’s Baconianism may have been rhetorical. The society encompassed a heterogeneous membership and tended to create myths about its cohesiveness when it was under attack. And attack its critics did. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for example, Jonathan Swift ridicules the futile projects pursued in the ‘Academy of Lagado’, inspired by the research undertaken by members of the Royal Society. Historian Martha Ornstein is so persuaded of the rhetorical use of Baconianism that she sees the imagery of ‘Salomon’s House’ as fulfilling for learned societies what the Communist Manifesto did for socialism.

Other scientific societies did not trace their inspiration so directly to Bacon. Galileo wielded enormous influence over scientific developments in Italy, and he was a member of Rome’s Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1603. Like Rome, many Italian cities housed learned societies, more properly Renaissance academies that promoted a range of subjects: Bologna claimed an Accademia degli Affidati (1548) and Naples an Accademia Secretorum Naturae (ca. 1560) and later an Accademia degli Investiganti (ca. 1650). Unlike other Renaissance academies, however, those in Bologna and Naples concerned themselves with the cultivation of natural knowledge, rather than literature or the arts.

The foremost among the Italian academies was the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiments), founded in 1657. The small society of nine members – including the important naturalists Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1674) and Francesco Redi (1626–ca.1698) – depended on the patronage of Prince Leopold de’Medici and answered to his whims. It assembled a fine collection of scientific instruments to effect its sole purpose: conducting experiments. Members tested the theoretical work of Galileo and his disciples and recorded the results anonymously in the Academy’s Saggi di naturali experienze. Despite the group’s pronounced commitment to empiricism and their rejection of all speculative theorizing, Academy members fell victim to the conservative backlash of the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation. It also suffered through the centrifugal force of members’ personal quarrels, resulting in disbandment for ten years until they settled their differences.

Even seventeenth-century Germany, in its state of political fragmentation and economic torpor, could claim scientific societies. In Altdorf, a Collegium Curiosum sive Experimentale was created in 1672 with twenty members, after the model of the Accademia del Cimento. Some twenty years earlier, an Academia Naturae Curiosorum had been founded, whose principal function was to publish an annual volume of contributions by its physician members, the Miscellanea Curiosorum. But it was only with the creation of the Berlin Academy in 1700, at the urging of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, that Germany could claim a society along the lines of the Royal Society or France’s Académie des Sciences. The society was to be funded by the proceeds from the monopoly on printing calendars owned by the elector (the future Prussian king, Frederick I). Part of the Berlin Academy’s programme involved the advancement of German technology and nationalism, giving particular attention to improving the German language. Leibniz’s activism also led to the creation of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1724.⁸

In France, academies could be found in provincial towns like Caen, Rouen, and Montpellier. These included not only learned societies as such, but also other kinds of educational institution, including schools of manly exercise, classical languages, and oratory. The capital city (as in England) dominated scientific life at this time. One of the earliest informal circles in Paris – dating back to the 1630s – was organized by the Minim monk Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), himself devoted to the physical sciences. Mersenne, who had studied mathematics with Descartes, translated some of the writings of Galileo into French and popularized the work of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). After Mersenne’s death in 1648, a successor to his academy was organized by nobleman Habert de Montmor (ca.1600–1679), which adopted a formal constitution in 1657. Weekly meetings took place in Montmor’s house; mathematician and cleric Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) presided over them. But the Montmor Academy became as much a social club for the highest levels of Parisian society as a forum for disseminating the new science.

It was through the Montmor Academy that the Royal Society began to influence the future shape of science in France. Members of the two organizations were linked by correspondence and personal visits; some individuals, like the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, belonged to both. The French admired the new spirit of critical enquiry exemplified by the English cultivation of empiricism and experiment. It remained unclear, however, how the English model of cooperation among men of different social backgrounds, political persuasions, and religious convictions might be applied in the French milieu. Personal rivalries – fuelled by competing philosophical doctrines like Cartesianism and experimentalism – helped to spell the collapse of Montmor Academy by 1665. The instability brought about by its indifferent financial support strengthened pleas by Melchisédech Thévenot (ca.1620–1692), Adrien Auzout (1622–1691) and Pierre Petit (ca.1594–1677) for the creation of a subsidized society for experimentation.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XIV, responded sympathetically to the advances of the former Montmorans. He adapted the plans put forward by Thévenot and his friends, in the end calling for fifteen salaried academicians, hand-picked from among the most distinguished scientific names of Europe. The positions were divided between two categories or classes: ‘mathematicians’ (also including astronomers) and ‘natural philosophers’, made up of chemists, physicists, and anatomists. (The decision to emphasize the physical sciences resulted from Colbert’s concern to minimize conflict with other established bodies, such as the Faculty of Medicine in Paris.) In contrast to the Royal Society, members were expected to specialize in a particular area of study. Their first meeting was convened in the Royal Library in 1666. Subsequently, meetings were held twice a week: mathematicians met on Wednesdays; natural philosophers on Saturdays.

There were strings attached to this act of royal munificence, especially on the part of the mercantilist Colbert. The Académie des Sciences joined the Académie Française in the Sun King’s intellectual firmament; at the very least, it was intended to proclaim, affirm, and reflect his glory. Academicians, in addition, were expected to deliver on the experimentalists’ utilitarian promises, which linked scientific investigations with advancement in industry, trade, and military prowess.

As a result of being given a clear mandate from the government, the early Académie des Sciences appeared to embrace the Baconian programme of cooperative research in at least two concrete ways that the Royal Society did not. The establishment of the Observatoire de Paris in 1699 allowed Academicians to carry out a continuous programme of observing the heavens and mounting scientific expeditions, with these undertakings ultimately leading to the solution of navigational and astronomical problems. The Académie also required its members to cooperate on a regular basis in order to adjudicate the merit of technical processes and to bestow patents on worthy inventions. The practice of the early Académie des Sciences suggests that cooperative efforts were more effectively applied to evaluating new ideas than to creating them.

The workings of the early Académie des Sciences remain somewhat obscure, at least until a total overhaul occurred in 1699. Before this date, the Académie had possessed neither rules nor constitution. Colbert himself had selected the first academicians, foreign as well as French, the most distinguished being the Dutch natural philosopher Huygens. Later appointees to the working membership of fifteen pensionaries – rigidly divided according to scientific speciality (geometry, astronomy, mechanics, anatomy, or chemistry) – included the astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) and the polymath Leibniz. The Académie possessed, in addition, ten honorary positions. Somewhat surprisingly, Cartesians were excluded in this, the home of Descartes; activists like Auzout and Thévenot were marginalized. At this early stage in its history, the Académie des Sciences functioned under Baconian inspiration, with a small membership undertaking joint experimental investigations on a range of topics. It was an elitist association, limited in size with an exclusive admissions policy.⁹

To some extent the early Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences may be seen as typifying the English and French scientific traditions. The Royal Society grew out of individual initiative and received royal recognition only after the fact. From its inception, it drew heavily upon the landed gentry for its membership and treasury; as a result, the breadth of its interests wandered away from the narrowly scientific. The Académie des Sciences, by contrast, functioned more as a branch of the French civil service, with a high degree of regimentation and control exercised from above. It remains difficult to assess the relative merits of the two scientific systems: the French, with its strong stamp of centralization and control, versus the English tradition, which cultivated individual self-reliance, perhaps as a direct result of the lack of state support. Whatever the advantages of either system, we see here the first crystallization of national differences in scientific traditions. The rise of nation states in the nineteenth century enhanced these distinctions.

Science flourished in Britain during the last half of the seventeenth century, despite the collapse of earlier humanitarian projects and the cynicism displayed by the king. Any decline in membership in the Royal Society was more than counterbalanced by the rise of new provincial centres of scientific activity, for example, in the creation of philosophical societies at Dublin and Oxford, both founded in 1683. As Michael Hunter has explained, seventeenth century English society showed a penchant for establishing public bodies, as opposed to impermanent, highly mutable structures dependent on personal whim.

France, on the other hand, failed to emerge as a centre of scientific excellence, despite the elaborate designs of enlightened despotism which had brought the full support of the state to a host of scientific projects. By the late seventeenth century, these programmes fell afoul of political and economic contingencies. The increasingly extravagant ambitions of Louis XIV, ushering in an era of prolonged warfare with England, meant a decline in financial support for science. A period of domestic intolerance, inaugurated with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, further contracted opportunities for the free exchange of scientific ideas, and Protestant intellectuals like Henri Justel (1620–1693) were marginalized.

The rise of the scientific correspondent

The creation and persistence of the new institutions attests the strength of the scientific movement. An additional ‘barometer of intellectual health’, in the words of Harcourt Brown, was the ‘exchange of news, books, and journals’ among these organizations, particularly through official or unofficial representatives. Operating from the Place Royale in Paris, for example, Mersenne circulated information to an informal network of French natural philosophers, including Descartes, Gassendi, Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665), Gilles de Roberval (1602–1675) and Blaise Pascal. Mersenne constructed an unprecedented system of scientific communication, with nearly eighty participants. An even more elaborate correspondence network was established by the Royal Society’s Henry Oldenburg, who as secretary from 1662 until his death in 1677, exchanged information with Mersenne and Henri Justel, secretary to Louis XIV. Modern science began as an international undertaking.

Justel disseminated English scientific news and books across continental Europe. For nearly thirty years, until his death in 1693, he was Henry Oldenburg’s most important link with Europe; he lent incalculable assistance to advancing the Royal Society’s reputation. Justel channelled information through a circle of intimate acquaintances who attended his ‘conferences’ in Paris, as well as through a more widely ranging network of contacts with the leading intellectuals of Europe. French members of his circle included Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), founder of the Caen Académie des Sciences and the Abbé Charles, one of the editors of the Journal des sçavans. Despite Justel’s illustrious collaborators, his correspondence has been seen as valuable not for its coherent exposition of a particular point of view, but for ‘the mass of dissociated facts and opinions … conveyed’.¹⁰ Even a cursory examination of the letters exchanged between Oldenburg and Justel reveals how much useful scientific information could be gleaned from what appears to be, on the surface, just delightfully candid gossip.

Intelligencers like Justel and Oldenburg depended upon travellers and diplomats to transmit their parcels and letters. A network of courtiers, statesmen, and civil servants scattered across the Continent, the Near East, and the New World provided Oldenburg with the machinery for collecting information and gaining new foreign agents. Oldenburg’s contacts, who introduced him to local virtuosi, sent summaries of new books, reports of experiments, and simple accounts of everyday scientific activity. Formal relations between the Royal Society and foreign academies were merely polite and sterile; virtually all news of Continental science went to Oldenburg from Justel or from Englishmen abroad.

The importance of these connections suggests that the rise of scientific societies has depended on the emergence of the apparatus of the modern state. Departing from traditional Marxist arguments by which science is driven by economic need, the demands of capitalism failed to dictate a set of problems to seventeenth-century researchers. Rather, the expansion of trade and commerce associated with the rise of capitalism provided a means of collecting and amassing valuable information. Groups in one geographical location could be brought into communication with like-minded individuals elsewhere. Essentially, seventeenth-century mercantile developments nurtured and sustained the evolution of learned societies.

Eighteenth-century expansion

A century after the creation of the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences there were around two hundred societies devoted to science or technology. In France alone, twenty-five provincial academies appeared by the eve of the French Revolution. Generally speaking, these societies stimulated research and provided for the diffusion of that research through their publications. The appellation of ‘literary society’ – characteristic of eighteenth-century societies – refers less to their cultivation of belles lettres than to their concern with scientific literature.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, learned societies emerged, as James McClellan puts it, as ‘the characteristic form for the organization of culture’ throughout the Western world and its spheres of influence. A host of subsets of these societies might be discussed, but for our purpose those exclusively or even partially devoted to science (along with literary studies or technology) are the most interesting. Their exponentially increasing number outdistanced other institutional forms of scientific activity, whether botanical gardens, observatories, or universities. No leading scientist was without an affiliation to one of them. Not only did they sponsor publications, but they endowed prizes and funded expeditions. McClellan understands the flourishing of scientific academies during the last half of the eighteenth century as ‘an unprecedented development in the organizational and institutional history of science’. As he demonstrates, by the end of the eighteenth century, scientific societies extended ‘from Philadelphia and Kentucky in the west to Saint Petersburg (or arguably Batavia, the East Indies) in the east, and from Trondheim (Norway) in the north to Sicily and Haiti in the south’.

The establishment of learned societies during the eighteenth century became an international movement, reaching its peak in the 1780s. These institutions were concentrated in European urban centres, particularly in France. Few nations failed to support scientific societies; only the European capital cities of Spain and Austria were without them. They were – alongside churches, courts of law, and universities – manifestations of high culture, with all its implications of exclusiveness. Only during the next century would this fundamental characteristic of scientific societies be altered; no longer would they be the exclusive prerogative of a learned and powerful elite.

Eighteenth-century developments may be categorized according to the two dominant models for scientific organization established during the seventeenth century. One was that of the Paris Académie des Sciences, the generic ‘academy’, frequently found on the Continent. The other, the ‘society’ model exemplified by the Royal Society, emerged in the less stratified societies of Britain, the United States, and Holland. Both types are united by their possession of chartered corporate status and written rules. They convened regular meetings, appointed officers, and elected a restricted number of fellows. In addition to official quarters, they often claimed libraries, collections, botanical gardens, and observatories.

Important distinctions, however, may also be drawn between the academy and society models. Academies, more so than societies, tended to be state-supported institutions; the state accordingly extracted its due by controlling their duties and responsibilities. Societies enjoyed much more autonomy and independence, but because they lacked a clearly defined mission, they tended to be less productive. The internal structure of the two forms of scientific institution differed significantly, which may be illuminated by comparing the Académie des Sciences with the Royal Society.

The Académie des Sciences possessed a restricted, yet heterogeneous membership, stratified in a strict hierarchy. Its officers were drawn from its two constituent classes, the regular and the honorary members. At the top of the scientific core of regular members (pensionnaires, who were paid pensions for their services) were eighteen individuals, three of whom represented each of the Académie’s six sections: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, anatomy, chemistry, and botany, in addition to the permanent secretary and treasurer. Below them in the hierarchy were twelve associate and twelve adjunct members. Nonresident members who did not have to attend meetings but who were excluded from decision-making came next: twelve members from the provinces, eight distinguished foreign scientists, and seventy corresponding members. On average, the Académie could claim just over one hundred and fifty members at any point during the eighteenth century, with fewer than fifty among the resident scientific core. In total, only 716 men belonged to the Académie over the course of the century.

The Royal Society – ‘larger, less professional and exclusive, and more homogeneous’, in the words of James McClellan – was no match for the success of the Académie des Sciences, where scientific accomplishment, finally, was the currency of admission. The Royal Society averaged 325 fellows, seven times the size of the core group in Paris, with nonscientists outnumbering scientists two to one. Election was decided by the membership itself. Without any internal differentiation of its membership into categories or classes, the society became too unwieldy to conduct administrative matters, let alone prosecute any kind of joint scientific endeavours, at its weekly meetings. During the eighteenth century, a twenty-one member elected council, led by an increasingly powerful president, assumed all administrative responsibilities and became the ‘guiding force’ of the Society.

Both the Paris Académie and the Royal Society spawned imitators elsewhere. Academies in Montpellier, Turin, and Mannheim, for example, imitated Paris’s example. Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society copied the Royal Society. A new hybrid form introduced during and characteristic of the eighteenth century was the ‘universal’ society devoted to both science and the arts. The Royal Society of Edinburgh contained literary and scientific sections; the Royal Irish Academy was divided into science, belles lettres, and antiquities. The typical French provincial society dedicated itself to science, belles lettres, and the mechanical arts. German academies often focused on wissenshaftlichen disciplines. Those in Göttingen and Prague had sections for physical, mathematical, and historical sciences. As McClellan summarizes this diversity, when resources were scarce, the ‘multi-area’ institution was adopted; the ‘single field type’ emerged where resources were plentiful.

The most important scientific societies of the eighteenth century were official institutions, legally recognized by their respective governments. This legal status conferred important privileges on the societies, including technological consulting, control of the scientific press, and self-government. McClellan argues that according to this arrangement, institutions and governments ‘struck a deal’, whereby institutions received ‘recognition, funding, and privileges in exchange for technical service and advice’. In essence, societies and academies sold their expertise and knowledge for the power to control the practice of science within their own cultural milieu. The emerging nation states of Europe supported scientific societies as a gesture of alliance with the forces of rational enlightenment, progress, and modernization.

Scientific associations, coming in many shapes and sizes, also may be arranged according to a pyramid of importance. An elite group of national academies in capital cities belong to the top of the hierarchy: the Royal Society, the Paris Académie, the Berlin Academy, the St Petersburg Academy, and the Royal Swedish Academy. Almost all were devoted to scientific pursuits exclusively; they received generous support and powerful privileges, often dating back a century or more. At the next level fall a host of institutions founded in large urban centres and provincial capitals; these include societies and academies in Edinburgh, Montpellier, Göttingen, Bologna, and Philadelphia. They received only modest financial revenues, they tended to be founded later in the eighteenth century, and they cultivated nonscientific subjects alongside science. The scientific accomplishments of this more heterogeneous group were less uniform and less sustained. The base of the pyramid rested on institutions that never built a reputation; these include societies at Marseilles, Barcelona, and Rotterdam, for example. Many were founded in smaller towns and cities late in the century and did not obtain official recognition for years. They cultivated a range of disciplines and possessed undistinguished memberships.

What makes the eighteenth century unique for the institutionalization of science is that individual organizations – big or little, national or local – interacted to forge a larger institutional network. As the Memoirs of the Medical Society of London, founded in 1773, stated: ‘The principal part of our knowledge must be ever derived from comparing our own observations with those of others. In this view the utility of societies, which afford an opportunity for the mutual communication of our thoughts, must be sufficiently apparent.’ Sending memoirs and soliciting exchanges became a routine activity. This meant that scientific research and information could henceforth be circulated through regular channels. At issue here is something other than publication, which had already been inaugurated through the system of official journals; rather, academic publications found an assured venue of distribution. In a word, the academies began to ‘market’ science, having done their utmost to create an audience.

Nineteenth-century consolidation

Once firmly established in the collective consciousness, scientific societies and academies became arbiters of science. With the French revolutionary zeal to abolish privilege in all of its manifestations, it is hardly surprising that the Académie des Sciences became a prime target. It was an institution, even an instrument, of the king, and it was a bastion of elitism. Myths were perpetuated about how self-taught artisans presented their inventions to a jaded academy, only to be rebuffed and humiliated. Not only did the Académie represent an intellectual aristocracy, but it contained a special class of honorary members selected from the social aristocracy. It met for the last time on 21 December 1792; it re-emerged in 1795 as the First Class (or division) of the Institut de France. (With the restoration of the monarchy, the former title of Académie was likewise restored.)

Even before this reincarnation, the Académie des Sciences had begun to turn its back on its Baconian heritage, particularly the collectivist imperative. Rather than acting to generate scientific knowledge, the Académie emerged as an adjudicator, passing judgement on the merits of its members’ contributions, in pure and in applied fields. Its imprimatur became a coveted sign of national, or even international, prestige. Election to an academy seat became the crowning achievement of a life’s work; appointment to a professorial chair seemed trivial by comparison. Unlike the case during the eighteenth century, all academicians (at least in theory) were equal, since junior ranks had been abolished. By making election a process of ‘filling dead men’s shoes’ – whereby leading contenders most closely approximated the deceased (or soon to depart) academician – the Académie defined the shape of science in France. As Maurice Crosland explains, it was almost as if the subjects included in the First Class of the Institute chose the academicians.

The Académie des Sciences inaugurated new functions during the nineteenth century, such as semiannual public meetings. The Comptes rendus, created in 1835, brought the proceedings of the Academy and the eloquent éloges of its deceased members to the attention of an international community. Crosland argues that the centrality and comprehensiveness of the Comptes rendus tended to relegate all extramural efforts to oblivion. Responsibility for publications belonged to the permanent secretary, elected for life and given a comfortable annual salary of 6000 francs (about 300 pounds sterling).

By the mid nineteenth century, the Royal Society had also forsaken parts of its earlier scientific mission. Its statutes finally recognized that its role in experiment was more passive than active, more imagined than real. Regulations stated simply that the Society’s purpose was ‘to read and hear letters, reports, and other papers, concerning Philosophical matters’. In Boas Hall’s words, the atmosphere of meetings changed from ‘an atmosphere of lively discussion and debate and the frequent display of experiment’ to one that was ‘determinedly formal and lifeless’. This change did not signify that experiment was held in low regard, or that fellows had ceased to be good experimentalists, nor that nineteenth-century experiments could not be demonstrated. Rather, it indicated that the Society’s conventions had changed, placing new emphasis on results rather than processes. Papers might derive from experiment, but they were no longer accompanied by experiential demonstration.

No one disputed that experiment formed the centrepiece of the Society’s activities, only that this approach offered an imperfect and impartial view of the natural world. This was precisely the criticism of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, who believed that experimentalism offered an insufficient replacement for general principles, frameworks, and even theories. The complaint resurfaced among the spiritualists, vitalists, and theologians of later centuries, who found their concerns excluded by a materialist Royal Society. In 1878, the British geologist John Jeremiah Bigsby (1792–1881), for example, lamented the fact that in the Royal Society ‘Belief in no God and no Bible is openly paraded’. His protégé, Canadian paleobotanist John William Dawson (1820–1899), concurred that the religious scepticism of its leaders was ‘eating the heart’ out of science.

The emergence of specialized societies

Since its inception in the seventeenth century, the scientific society has sought to represent a range of philosophical interests. Sometimes art and antiquities were included to accommodate the interests of aristocratic virtuosi; certainly members’ investigations into any part of the natural sciences (and their applications) were welcomed. With the growth in size of the scientific community over the course of the eighteenth century and with the expansion of its interests, organizations devoted to the sciences in general no longer commanded attention. Scientists began to occupy themselves with a more restricted range of human experience, seeking, as well, to associate themselves with others who held similar concerns. As a result, the specialist society – one based on what we would recognize as the contents of a particular scientific discipline – began to emerge. Organizations like the Geological Society of London, founded in 1807, became known for the camaraderie and conviviality exhibited by its members, in contrast to the stiff formality displayed in the proceedings of the Royal Society.

James McClellan sees the creation of specialist societies around the turn of the nineteenth century as an accentuation of a tradition in existence decades earlier. He admits, however, that with the foundation of the Linnean Society of London in 1788, the single-discipline society became ‘less the institutional oddity, and more the norm’. In England, the Geological Society of London (1807), Zoological Society of London (1826), Royal Astronomical Society (1831), and Chemical Society of London (1841) followed in relatively quick succession. Henceforth the tendency in scientific organization was a coalescence around disciplinary interests.

As it turned out, the partial solution to specialist interests provided in the sections of the Académie des Sciences simply meant that societies restricted to certain scientific disciplines were created, on average, about a generation later in France than in England.¹¹ French academicians did not perceive the establishment of these societies as a threat to their hegemony, since, in their view, the Académie contained the most distinguished practitioners in any particular speciality. Academicians often accepted (with some degree of condescension) senior positions in these societies, a procedure intended to elevate the new organization’s status. Unlike the Académie, specialist societies in France acted to diffuse the study of one particular science to a wider audience.

Jealousy towards rival scientific organizations was not an unreasonable reaction on the part of established societies, particularly when new fields of knowledge were represented. The danger was that specialized societies might become associated with the vanguard, and general societies with the rearguard, of the scientific enterprise. Indeed, in the case of Paul Broca (1824–1880) and the Anthropological Society in Paris, the new society offered the means of establishing the legitimacy of the nascent social science of anthropology. The formal organization attracted attention to and supplied a power base for the discipline’s founders and promoters.

The complexity of the relationship between established national societies and new specialist ones is revealed in the interactions between the Royal Society and the Geological Society. As Joseph Banks (1743–1820), the powerful president of the Royal Society, expressed his fear about the incipient importance of the geological and other London societies: ‘these new fangled Associations will finally dismantle the Royal Society and not leave the old lady a rag to cover her’. Geologists, for their part, felt that their interests commanded little respect in the eyes of the older society. One aspirant to membership was cautioned that ‘unless a geological paper be of high merit it does not meet in the Royal Society such acceptance as one in terrestrial magnetism, electricity, [or] chemistry’.

It is hardly surprising that the Royal Society should have felt some jealousy towards its younger, more lively sibling. Since its foundation, the Geological Society grew more fashionable and scientifically significant. It was composed, wrote the distinguished Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), of ‘robust, joyous, and independent spirits, who toiled well in the field, and who did battle and cuffed opinions with much spirit and great good will’. Charles Babbage (1792–1871) lauded the Geological Society in his generally gloomy treatise on the decline of science in England, and no important geologist refused to join the organization. Furthermore, governments and universities referred geological matters not to the Royal Society but to influential members of the Geological Society. The rolls of the Society listed distinguished fellows by the 1830s – peers, members of parliament, landowners, and bankers; both Charles Darwin and the comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892) joined during that decade. Leading scientists filled positions on its Council: Roderick Murchison (1792–1871), Charles Lyell (1797–1875), and William Whewell (1794–1866) served as president; secretaries included Henry De la Beche (1796–1855) and Darwin.

At the same time that they inspired others to copy them and as they accommodated their hegemony to specialist interests, scientific bodies also fuelled petty feuds and disputes, particularly from those who had been excluded. Sometimes the jealousy remained merely isolated, negative, and remote; on other occasions, it assumed a more positive role, by uniting the dissatisfied and bringing them together to form rival institutions. Even the Canadian Sir William Dawson, whose interests had been badly served by establishment science, so esteemed the Royal Society that he modelled Canada’s national scientific society after it. A range of alternative scientific organizations – some broadly conceived, some specialist in focus – were spawned from the late eighteenth century onwards. They generally sought to democratize the scientific enterprise and to extend the benefits of membership to a larger circle.