The ArugmentThis essay answers a single question: what was Robert Hooke, the Royal Society's curator of experiments, doing in his well-known 1665 work,Micrographia?Hooke was articulating a “universal cure of the mind” capable of bringing about a “reformation in Philosophy,” a change in philosophy's interpretive practices and organization. The work explicated the interpretive and political foundations for a community of optical instrument users coextensive with the struggling Royal Society. Standard observational practices would overcome the problem of using nonstandard instruments, while inherent (...) inrepresentation– the interpretive practice championed in the text – were important theological and political meanings. Hooke's kind of experimental philosophy undermined the claims made by “atheists” and “enthusiasts” – the enemies of the restored church and state – while also producing useful knowledge. Equally important, Hooke modeled the community described inMicrographiaupon the classicalres publica, but his community made important concessions to Restoration political realities, especially the growing role of commercial or transactional relationships. (shrink)

Much has been written about Robert Hooke's so-called ‘Discourse of Earthquakes’, the series of lectures he delivered before the Royal Society of London over the years 1667–1700. The chief points of the lectures are thus well known: fossils are the remains of once-living organisms, and their burial in rather odd places within the earth's crust can be explained by the dislocations of land and sea resulting from earthquakes.

SummaryA letter in which astronomer John Flamsteed expounded his unusual views about the causes of earthquakes survives in a number of drafts and copies. Though it was compiled in response to shocks felt in England in 1692 and Sicily in 1693, its relationship to the wide range of comparable theories current in the later seventeenth century must be considered. Flamsteed's suggestion that an ‘earthquake’ might be an explosion in the air was linked with contemporary thinking about the roles of sulphur (...) and nitre in earthquakes underground, and in combustion, respiration, and other processes. It reveals his concern with subjects other than astronomy and the influence of his continuing contact with members of the Royal Society; it also offers an early example of how seventeenth-century work on sulphur and nitre prepared the way for ‘airquake’ and electrical theories associated with the London earthquake of 1750. (shrink)

Lomonosov began his scientific career with the study of mining, but his active mind quickly led him to the considerations of physics and chemistry which occupied most of his life. Only toward the end of his career did he begin the systematic treatment of geology and metallurgy. The guiding principle of his thought in these fields became and remained a belief in the extreme age of the earth and the constant modification of its surface. He assumed the presence of a (...) central fire produced by the gradual consumption of sulphur, whose combustion produced earthquakes and mountain formation. Rock formed from clay and eroded into sand which could again be compacted to rock. Plants and animals produced alkaline and earthy materials which by combination with vitriolic acid and phlogiston from burning sulphur gave salt and metals. Fossils were petrified organic remains. (shrink)