Our Foreign Correspondence

Our Foreign CorrespondenceAuthor(s): Alan CookSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 53, No. 2 (May, 1999), pp. 179-182Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/532203 .

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 53 (2), 179-182 (1999)

OUR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE

The Society was fortunate in its first Fellows whose gifts, positions and influence set it off on a good start, so that although it has experienced low times, it has recovered and flourished anew on its sound foundations. Among those founders, Henry Oldenburg must be prominent. Today the Society takes part in many international organizations, international unions, academia Europea, and others, and keeps close relations with sister academies. The Foreign Secretary is kept busy and has to enjoy travelling. In today's world the Society, like so many other institutions, has to move with the global times. Obvious though that may be, it should not lead us to overlook the importance of foreign correspondence which mattered also in the early years of the Society, and Oldenburg vigorously promoted it. The early success of the Society depended in part on the connections its Fellows established with natural philosophers elsewhere in Europe, and indeed in North America, where a Mather and a Winthrop were early eighteenth-century Fellows. Fellows corresponded with them, elected many into the Fellowship, and welcomed them to the Society's meetings.

Oldenburg was well known to a number of the prospective Fellows who contemplated the formation of the Society. In particular, Lady Ranelagh, the politically influential sister of Robert Boyle, had employed him as tutor to her son, and clearly appreciated his qualities. He was industrious, had come to know something of European natural philosophy through his travels in Europe, and as a tutor was keen to disseminate knowledge. He had the right capacities for the first Secretary of the Society and he was known to influential people. He was the right man in the right place.

The article in this issue on Oldenburg's early correspondence shows how as an intermediary he interpreted his correspondents' views one to another, but it may be that his influence was more in consequential putting his correspondents in direct touch with each other. Among the foreign correspondents of Flamsteed two stand out. The leading continental astronomers in the middle of the 17th century were Johann Hevelius, in his private observatory in Danzig, and Gian Domenico Cassini in the Observatoire Royale in Paris. Oldenburg began the correspondence with each of them and then, especially after Oldenburg had died, Flamsteed carried it on himself. Each dealt with important issues. Hevelius was at odds with English and French astronomers over the use of open or telescopic sights to observe stellar positions. Hevelius thought that telescopic sights introduced errors. Flamsteed, Hooke, Auzout, Picard, thought that they had inherent limitations. Flamsteed and Hevelius discussed the question and compared results of observations in long and respectful letters, for Hevelius's work was justly admired. Hooke wrote a more abrasive article in Philosophical Transactions which offended Hevelius and led the Society to encourage Halley to visit Hevelius in 1679 to resolve the dispute if possible by observing together. Good relations were re-established with the Society, but Hevelius retained his out-of-date opinions until his death. The correspondence was valuable because it helped to reveal and clarify a number of sources of error in astrometry. With Cassini, Flamsteed discussed times of the occultations of his satellites by Jupiter. Cassini

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Sir Alan Cook

thought that they made the best common timekeepers to compare with local time for the determination of longitude. He had advised Queen Christina of Sweden to set up an observatory in the garden of her Palazzo Riario in Rome for regular observations of the satellites, and he organized observations in France to determine longitudes, the beginning of the geodetic survey of France. Cassini and Flamsteed discussed irregularities in the motions, in part arising from the finite speed of light identified by Ole Roemer, but not accepted by Cassini, and in part arising from the strong polar flattening of Jupiter himself, as Halley suggested.

Comets often figured in the correspondence of early Fellows of the Society. In Book III of the Principia, Newton discussed a considerable number of observations of the great comet of 1680 and showed that it followed a parabolic orbit about the Sun, so extending the scope of his celestial mechanics beyond the regular planets and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. It made a powerful argument that gravity was universal. Newton could use reports of observations from North America as well as from Europe, but he also had first-hand information from travellers, in particular from Halley who had happened to be in Paris when the comet made its spectacular return from behind the Sun. Halley was more than a reporter, for he had joined Cassini in observing the comet until its disappearance in February 1681. It is not surprising that Newton gave most attention to the observations in Greenwich and Paris. Halley, having subsequently visited Gallet in Avignon and Pere Eschinardi and others in Rome, may have been the source of the critical comments that Newton made on the Roman observations. Although Halley may have had an introduction from Cassini to Eschinardi and others in Rome, he also went to Rome in the wake of enquiries about the state of Roman science that the Society had made through Octaviari Pullein. Pullein had met Eschinardi and Monsignor Ciampini who had founded the Accademia Fisica-Mathematica with the encouragement of Queen Christina, but he thought Roman science was weak, a view with which Halley seemed to agree.

The visits of Pullein and Halley seem not to have led to any continuing astronomical correspondence between the Society and Rome*, but astronomy was not the only subject that figured in the correspondence of Oldenburg and other Fellows. Campani in Rome was a particularly skilled optician at the end of the 17th century, making both telescopes and microscopes, and biology profited from his instruments. Malpighi, a Fellow of the Society, was highly regarded for his biological studies, and Halley knew the magnetic works of the polymath Athanasius Kircher. Leeuwenhoek had close connections with the Society. With his own very powerful microscopes he made important discoveries in biology, and Hooke, in particular kept in touch with him.

Foreign correspondence was not left to Oldenburg. At early meetings Fellows often read letters they had received from distant parts of Britain and from Europe, North America, the West Indies, India and other places. Observations and ideas were exchanged across Europe and across the world-the Society set no geographical bounds to its interests. There were letters on astronomical events; geography of Slovenia; tides; botanical, animal and human curiosities; antiquities and social customs.

*Some three years later Flamsteed was briefly in correspondence with Ciampini and Bianchini.

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Ourforeign correspondence

Figure 1. Examples of the early correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, from a volume of his Letters (EL.01) which is held in the Library and Archives of the Royal Society. The letters depicted (nos. 72-75) are in French or Latin and were written in London

between 10 June and 18 July 1668.

Letters between Fellows and foreign correspondents often followed travels of Fellows abroad. Halley's visits have been mentioned. Locke studied medicine at Montpellier, and later spent some years in the Netherlands after the discovery of the Rye House plot, with which he may have been associated. He remained there until he returned to London in the wake of William and Mary. Wren visited Paris, and John Ray went to France. John Evelyn was in France and Italy during the Civil Wars, and Pepys and Elizabeth had a holiday in France and the Low Countries. The Society in its turn welcomed foreign visitors to its meetings. G.D. Cassini never came to England, but Ole Roemer did, and met Flamsteed, but not Halley who was on his way to Danzig. Leibniz came twice to London and on his second visit saw some of Newton's papers in the Society's possession, so laying a fuse for the bitter dispute between them over the priority for the calculus.

Some 50 years after the foundation of the Society a distinguished Italian astronomer and antiquary, Francesco Bianchini, spent the early months of 1713 in England. He met Newton and other Fellows, attended three meetings of the Society, and was elected and admitted. He had been a member of the short-lived Roman Academy of Ciampini and had a number of diplomatic and other responsibilities in the Papal

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Court. He wrote a detailed account of his visit in a manuscript that is now in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome. He spent most time in London, but also went to Oxford and Hampton Court. His visit coincided with the height of the dispute between Flamsteed and Newton over the publication of Flamsteed's work, and each gave his views to Bianchini.

These scattered instances show that Oldenburg's foreign correspondence both arose from and fertilized the wider connections of the Society in Europe and North America. His was indeed a very important part in the development of the early Society, but it would not have been so fruitful had it not matched the interest that many Fellows took in natural philosophy outside England. For a few decades the Royal Society was in effect the European and North American Academy of Natural Knowledge.

Sir Alan Cook, F.R.S.



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Our Foreign Correspondence