TY - JOUR
AU1 - Marples, Alice
AB - Abstract The poor state of the Royal Society's Repository in the eighteenth century has been seen as a symbol of the institution's decline. This article contributes to recent reinterpretation by putting this collection within its historical contexts of use and understanding, exploring the ambiguous relationship between private and ‘public’ resources by examining the collections alongside other spaces of discursive inquiry and institutional improvement. It argues that specific approaches towards scientific administration during this period helped change the perception and purpose of the Repository, from ‘a physical storehouse of knowledge’ to the icon and tool of a successful and faciliatory scientific society. In 1696 Arthur Charlett, the master of University College, Oxford, wrote to Hans Sloane to thank him for his donation of a book just placed in the Bodleian Library.1 Updating his friend, Charlett mentioned the recent failed attempt to revive the Oxford Philosophical Society. A similar society had been set up by John Wilkins in 1651, but Charlett's had been founded by the naturalist Robert Plot at the Ashmolean Museum in 1683.2 The group had drawn a number of regular attendees such as Martin Lister and Edward Lhwyd to its lively discussions of natural historical and antiquarian matters, but had disbanded when Plot left Oxford in 1690: Our Society has been long intermitted, the Call I remember with great Difficulty and some Act, which was the occasion of some expenses to my selfe, I got together, whence we chose officers … But since that we have had no meeting: In Dr Plots time when our Conferences were frequent, our Correspondence was numerous, and the Collections large, of which there are many Registers, I suppose in the Custody of the Secretary of the Museum. The Truth is I can give no good Reason for this Intermission here being several ingenious Persons, that seem willing to assemble.3 In his frustrated lament for this society, Charlett identified several desiderata for building and maintaining a successful scholarly gathering: space for discussion, a wide correspondence network, large collections, individual investment, and the dutiful recording and organization of resources.4 Sloane was likely to have been sympathetic on account of the apparent poor state of the Royal Society at the turn of the eighteenth century. As his old friend, Tancred Robinson, wrote to him in Jamaica in December 1687: ‘The Royall Society declines apace, not one Correspondent in being, the Revenue is settled upon Mr Hook, and Monsieur Papin goes next week to Settle in Germany. The same officers are chosen this year; I am afraid that you will find nothing but ruines at your return, all will appear an affront to you’.5 The Society's unreliable payment of wages and patchy record-keeping practices were frequently exacerbated by an internal muddle of personal and institutional responsibilities, as revealed when a panicking Richard Waller wrote to fellow secretary Sloane in September 1696: ‘As for the Keys of the Papers, I never had Mr Halley's key which possibly he has left with Dr Hook if not Mr Hunt will open his press. I have no late Papers in my Custody and do not remember to have seen those you mention of Mr Coopers I suppose they are in Mr Halleys press’.6 Contemporary accounts famously reveal a similarly disordered Repository, the Society's collection of natural and artificial curiosities: dirty and unimpressive, with many of its objects damaged. It was common for foreign visitors, such as the Italian scholar Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, to report their surprise at ‘the modest premises that the Society occupied’ and reveal their displeasure at, for example, ‘the shabby conditions of the animal specimens in the Museum’.7 As the oft-repeated account from the German aristocrat Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach demonstrates, a large part of this shock came from the contrast between the Society's Repository and the perceived strength of its seemingly vast communication empire: Thus foreigners have just grounds for amazement when they hear how wretchedly all is now ordered. But it is the sight of the Museum that is most astounding. It consists of what appears to be two long narrow chambers, where lie the finest instruments and other articles (which Grew describes), not only in no sort of order or tidiness but covered in dust, filth and coal-smoke, and many of them broken and utterly ruined. If one inquires after anything, the operator who shows strangers round will usually say: ‘A rogue had it stolen away,’ or he will show you pieces of it, saying: ‘It is corrupted or broken’; and such is the care they take of things! Hardly a thing is to be recognised, so wretched do they all look.8 The poor state of the Repository during the first half of the eighteenth century has typically been taken as a symbol of the Society's decline after the intellectual and experimental dynamism of its founding years. Thomas Sprat's History recorded its original intention: As soon as they were reduc'd to a Fix'd Assembly, one of the Principal Intentions they propos'd to accomplish, was a General Collection of all the Effects of Arts, and the Common, or Monstrous Works of Nature … They have already drawn together into one Room the greatest part of all the several kinds of things, that are scatter'd throughout the Universe.9 As Michael Hunter has shown, this universal project had necessarily collapsed by the early eighteenth century, the impossibility of gathering a complete collection of the world reflecting an inability to reach the lofty heights of the Society's early aims. It seemed to descend into a ‘gentleman's club’ of curious but idle individuals who indulged the fashionable virtuosic elements of the Society over its scientific priorities: ‘In terms of the Society's activities, the image is of a shift away from the esoteric mathematical natural philosophy and experimental philosophy identified with early “heroes” such as Newton, Hooke and Boyle to an eclectic, undiscriminating concern with “curiosities”… perhaps in tune with the coffee-house culture’.10 Uffenbach posited the same damaging links between the Society's changing personnel and its intellectual virtue: ‘that is the way with all public societies. For a short time they flourish, while the founder and original members are there to set the standard; then come all kinds of setbacks, partly from envy and lack of unanimity, and partly because all kinds of people of no account become members; their final state is one of indifference and sloth. This has been the case with this Society too’.11 Encouraging popular dilettantism diminished the Society's intellectual fervour, increased the levels of public scorn directed towards it, and left the door open to individuals such as John Hill and Emanuel Mendes Da Costa, who manipulated the Society and its resources for their own credit and gain.12 Jennifer Thomas has unfavourably contrasted the proactive collecting strategies of the Society's founding years with the lacklustre ‘middle years’ of the early eighteenth century: lacking a ‘proper’ collecting strategy, the Society relied on unsolicited donations to furnish its cabinet, yet was not even very successful in attracting these, due to the increasing competition for material it faced from private collectors with superior collections and correspondence networks, such as Sloane.13 This declinist narrative, first established by disgruntled contemporaries, has been robustly challenged over the past twenty years by scholars such as Andrea Rusnock, David Philip Miller, Richard Sorrenson and Anita Guerrini, all of whom have emphasized instead the Society's broad-ranging activities, reclaiming in part the word ‘curious’ from typically pejorative associations.14 At the same time, Hunter and, most recently, Noah Moxham have revealed how the working complexion of the Society was significantly altered over time according to changing political and socio-cultural climates as well as the personal agency of its officers and other interested parties. This, as they demonstrated, led to a number of important internal reforms at the end of the seventeenth century.15 This article seeks to contribute further to this reinterpretation by focusing on the Repository in the early eighteenth century, the traditional target for critics of its more effete and self-indulgent Fellows. Using institutional records and the manuscripts of Sloane, who was secretary and then president of the Society throughout the early eighteenth century (and, according to some of the accounts discussed here, one of the main architects of its downfall), this article highlights the changing role of the Repository in the context of a broader reorientation in the Society's correspondence networks, administration and use. Exploring the extent of Sloane's influence within the Society, too, it examines the ambiguous relationships between private and ‘public’ information resources in the period, illuminating how contemporaries interacted with them, both physically and figuratively, through a wide range of other spaces of discursive inquiry associated with the Society. The line between Sloane as a private collector and patron and as an officer of the Royal Society was inexorably blurred, and he was able to use this natural confluence to funnel research resources (whether they be texts, images, objects or people) into the institution. As he and other Fellows sought to expand, integrate and improve their correspondence, printed papers, collections and records in the early eighteenth century, a growing emphasis was placed by the Society on the fungibility of intellectual capital and the ability to facilitate individual exchange, rather than the institutional possession or control of material goods. In demonstrating this, the article presents a new approach to the Repository that takes into greater account the historically contingent relationships between individual self-interest and agency, the shaping of collective identities, the use of objects, and institutional evolution within wider society. Rather than being a factor in or outcome of the ‘failure’ or ‘decline’ of the Society, the handling of the Repository alongside the institution's other resources during this period represents a productive reinterpretation of the Society's founding aims and practices, a half-deliberate set of strategies evolving from decades of frustration, factionalism and flux, and responding to the changing culture round it. Finally, this article argues that Sloane's lasting contribution to the Royal Society was ultimately the establishment of an enduring administrative structure, one that was equipped to supply the shifting requirements of a voluntary learned society, and to be portrayed as representing the needs of the wider British public throughout the eighteenth century. Correspondence networks have long been understood as crucial to the initial success of the Royal Society; it was only through the canvassing correspondence of Henry Oldenburg that the early Society was able to function at all.16 As R. K. Bluhm has shown, the Society's fortunes began to fall in the sixteen-seventies after he died: in 1691–5 there was the lowest average number of Fellows in the Society's history (115 down from a height of 215 in only ten years), particularly keenly felt after a purging of the membership lists in the sixteen-eighties for non-payment and non-participation. In the period 1701–5, both its average income and expenditure hit rock bottom.17 By the end of the seventeenth century, as Henry Lyons stated, ‘for twenty years past no report on [the finances] had been made at the Anniversary meetings, and the last time that one had been presented the sum owing to the Society for unpaid fees and subscription had reached £2000’.18 Contemporaries were acutely aware of the struggle, as John Flamsteed reported to his friend Richard Towneley in February 1680: ‘Our Meetings at the Royall Society want Mr Oldenburgs correspondencys and on that account are not so well furnisht nor frequented as formerly’.19 The problem was clearly understood to be a general lack of financial, intellectual and human resources, and it is therefore unsurprising that these issues formed the focus of many internal reforms at the Royal Society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Under Sloane's secretaryship (1693–1713) and Isaac Newton's presidency (1703–27), the Society forced its finances onto firmer ground.20 Largely, this was done through repeated attempts to recoup arrears (an effort which achieved little success until 1728) combined with significant individual investments. Bluhm recorded that between 1702 and 1708 a total of £240 was received through legacies and gifts.21 Having made his fortunes in Jamaica through his marriage to Elizabeth Rose (née Langley), the rich widow of a sugar plantation owner, and his successful medical practice, Sloane was able to set an energetic example to the Society, building his own reputation as a patron while actively encouraging others to invest their personal resources for the benefit of the wider Society.22 In a letter supporting Sloane's later bid for presidency, his former librarian, Jean Gaspar Scheuchzer, claimed that Sloane had been The chief Instrument in procuring them a firm establishment on the other end of the Town, and because they had not as yet cash enough, to buy Dr Browns House in Crane Court, where they now meet, he generously gave them the sum of one hundred pounds, and advanced, what money was wanting. This I am informed made the meetings of the Society more numerous, and influenc'd several Gentlemen to leave them their estates, or considerable legacies.23 This may have been a small stretch of the truth, as Bluhm noted that Sloane was actually one of several to contribute towards ‘paying off the mortgage’ or ‘towards the house’ in 1711–12. Others who paid around the same high amount included Newton, Richard Waller and Lord Sunderland, and there were many smaller contributions from, for example, Francis Aston (£50), Richard Mead (£30) and the apothecary James Petiver (£5 7s 6d).24 Yet one considerable legacy was that of Sir Godfrey Copley, who left money directly to Sloane: ‘I give and bequeath unto Hans Sloane, Doctor of Physic, and Abraham Hill of London, Esqr. The sum of one hundred pounds upon trust for the Royal Society of London for improving natural knowledge to be laid out in experiments or otherwise for the benefit thereof as they shall direct and appoint’.25 Copley had long been a personal correspondent of Sloane's, as well as a fellow attendant of the Society's meetings, and had contributed to his museum: through this interaction, he knew that Sloane was well placed to allocate funding and direct resources, while Abraham Hill was similarly well known for his administrative and business abilities in the Society and on the Board of Trade.26 Money was slow to accumulate, but accumulate it did: Lyons reports that between 1718 to 1727 the Society's average balance reported at Anniversary meetings was £390, showing solid improvement. At the end of 1731, Sloane (who had been president of the Society since 1727) negotiated the acquisition of a small estate of forty acres of arable land in Acton, Fulham. The Society bought it for £1,600, selling some of their South Sea Bonds, and then let it out for the sum of £65 per annum until 1882.27 During this time, too, there were a number of important improvements to the internal administration of the Society. The Council began to properly crack down on membership fees, engaging Francis Hauksbee to draw up lists of individuals who were in arrears, and began legal action for the first time, expelling some of those who were not willing to pay.28 Yet still most of the Society's experimenters, such as Hauksbee, Denis Papin and John Theophilius Desaguliers, had to supplement their poor or uneven payment with public lectures on natural philosophy. One clerk, John Thorpe, was forced to resign his position of six or seven years within the Society in 1712, apparently unable to afford residence in London despite having been granted a pay increase the previous year in return for his offer to catalogue the Library.29 As Larry Stewart has noted, Sloane was instrumental in arranging for people to get paid, often throwing his institutional weight around in order to ensure it.30 Where this was not possible he paid out of his own pocket, as when the clerk Jezreel Jones went to the Barbary Coast. The Council had stated beforehand that it would support him in any way it could, other than financially.31 In April 1701, having spent ‘50 Dollars’ shipping a ‘Tarantana tree’ to Tetuan, Jones was forced to write to Sloane personally from Cadiz to ask for money ‘or starve’.32 Five days later, Jones sent another letter discussing the collections he had sent via various seamen, promising soon to send him ‘a larger and more Excellent Collection’.33 But the case of Jezreel Jones was anything but an unambiguous example of Sloane stepping in to make up for the Society's financial shortcomings. In 1698, Jones, an elected and paid clerk to the Royal Society, had been given £100 by the Council and sent on an expedition to the interior of Africa. At a meeting on the 7 June 1699, Jones read an account of the ‘Barbary way of dressing and eating their food, with some other remarks’, and this appeared in the Philosophical Transactions early the following year.34 Other than a request for his observations on antelopes, made in February 1699, little more was asked of him by the Society. It is worth noting, however, that James Petiver showed two salamanders preserved in spirits of wine, along with a small serpent and a lizard, all from Portugal, at the meeting on 18 January 1699: these are likely to have been sent to him by Jones along with all manner of curious plants, as Petiver noted in his published catalogue, Musei Petiveriani, that Jones had made observations there in the summer of 1698. Two weeks later, Sloane showed ‘a piece of cloth-like substance from the inward bark of a Tree from Africa’, which again is likely to have come from Jones.35 There is also an entry (number 336) in Sloane's ‘Vegetable Substances’ manuscript catalogue, seemingly copied out from a letter, stating ‘Mr. Jones bought a bed stuff'd wt. it from Portugal wch. He told Mr. Doyly. Tree silk’.36 It seems that though Jones was being paid by the Society to report on his travels, he was sending materials to Sloane and Petiver in a more private capacity and these, in turn, were making their way into the public domain, shown at the Society or published, alerting those who were interested to their location in these individual collections. Once he returned, Jones presented several more objects to the Society, and these are recorded in the letter books and the working revision of Nehemiah Grew's original catalogue of the Repository made by members of the Repository committee as they were trying to sort it out.37 On 17 May 1699, Jones presented a pyrite, for which he was thanked, and in the catalogue he is recorded as giving the society two geodes and several pieces of bone, all found in the ‘gravell pits beyond Soho Square’ in June 1699 (along with an ‘eagle stone’ from the same place the following year). On the 31 May 1699, he presented a Brazilian calabash to add to the great number already in the Society's collection. When he could not attend a meeting at Gresham College in December 1699, and after finding no one present to leave them with, he sent Sloane the papers discussed at the previous meeting in his official capacity as clerk, along with a specimen of ‘Indian Fennell’ and a picture ‘Painted upon the Glass on the inside by a Napolitan in Maddrid’: ‘You may if you pleas untack it, to Satisfy the Curious, but with great Caution that it be not broke, Least a Restitution should be Demanded of me’. All these were presented in his name and were ordered to be put in the Repository.38 Though he was a proven contributor, the Society was unable to support Jones on his second voyage to north Africa in February 1701. Sloane and Petiver stepped into the breach, along with a number of other Fellows: in an undated letter, Jones apologized to Sloane for not taking his leave in person but assured him that Petiver saw him take the water (and in an accompanying letter to Petiver, Jones berated the apothecary for having made him leave all his newspapers for the voyage at The Gun, presumably a tavern visited together for one last drink: ‘but that was your fault betwixt friends for carrying me so much out of my way’). He asked Sloane to give his ‘Dutyfull respects to all the ^Honorable and^ Worthy Gentlemen my Benefactors’.39 In later letters, these are identified as John Hoskins, Francis Aston, John Somers, Walter Charleton, William Sherard, Henry Compton and Charles DuBois, individuals to whom he was sending all sorts of things, from plant bulbs to copies of sermons preached in Cadiz, where he got stuck through lack of money.40 In April 1702, Jones wrote to Petiver: ‘I send to Dr Sloane & you a Collection of Cadiz Plants gathered in the Campo Santo to be doing till I send you the rest. You must plead my cause for not sending my journal, & insite all worthy people to charity or else I shall Starve in Foreign Land, if I do not live upon the plants I gather for the Doctor & you’.41 These individuals, through their financial patronage, held a claim over Jones that the Society did not, and none held a greater claim than Sloane, who seems to have gained the most from Jones's voyage and only funnelled some of it into the Society (and that only when he deemed it necessary). On 21 May 1701, he read the letters he had been receiving since March from Jones, and on the 28 May ‘Doctor Sloane produced three sheets of Paper stain'd with several Flowers & Berries by Mr Jones in 1698. These were ordered to be put into the Repository’.42 On 11 March 1702, when Jones had returned home, he ‘shewed [the Society] the Designs and Draughts of several Fruit, Fishes, &c which he had observed in his late Voyage to Tetuan, Tangier, &c’. He was thanked, but there is no record of these draughts then being placed in the Repository.43 Yet Sloane ended up with a copy in his library, recorded in his original catalogues as ‘Mr. Jezreel Jones Collection of some productions of nature by him observed and drawn in Barbary, copied by Mr. Albin’. Eleazar Albin was an illustrator and correspondent of James Petiver, and made these brilliantly coloured copies in 1711 from Jones's original drawings and journal of observations, as well as the real objects from either Jones's or Sloane's collections.44 It appears from this case that, regardless of whether or not an individual was being paid by the Society, individual collectors and private benefactors were privileged, on the understanding that these would redirect resources to the Society at their own discretion. Institutional lack of resources demanded investment from private individuals who, in turn, reaped the rewards, benefiting from the blurred lines between their private resources with those of the Society: this was as true for Sloane as it had been for Robert Boyle and would be for Joseph Banks.45 Such behaviour was unsurprising in a period in which complex systems of reciprocal credit ruled society, where the lines between personal advantage and public interest were disputed, and where the state was, in the words of Mark Knights, still largely ‘a social construct that relied, in the main, on unpaid office-holders whose appointment reflected their social prestige and who exercised authority in return for socio-economic and political capital’.46 In the Royal Society, the entangled nature of individual and institutional business gave such Fellows the ability to direct resources as they saw fit: objects to different collections, and collectors to certain positions of power. Sloane, for example, informed the Council on 5 November 1701 that he had already ‘imployed Mr Humfrey Wanley in doing the business of the Clerk since Mr Jones's departure but withal he had told him that he must not expect any certain salary’ (Wanley was actually already being paid £15 a year, presumably from Sloane).47 The former apprenticed draper had been Sloane's protégé ever since Arthur Charlett had used him to send a letter to the physician in April 1698. Charlett requested that Wanley, recently appointed assistant to the Bodleian, be allowed sight of both Sloane's personal library and that of the Society: ‘he absolutely depends upon our Interest to come at, and which if not granted, I feare, even the Cottonian or St James Library will not attone or satisfy his curiosity for the disappointment’.48 Sloane and Wanley corresponded extensively with one another, exchanging many books and manuscripts, and Wanley became Sloane's cataloguer when he left Oxford in 1700.49 Wanley's proven skills in curation and administration – and the good personal relationship he had built with Sloane – also saw him elevated to a paid position of relative power within another, overlapping institution: he was officially and unanimously chosen as secretary to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (of which Sloane was also a member) in March 1703.50 Johann Gaspar Scheuchzer similarly came to London in 1722 to be employed as Sloane's live-in librarian only after his father and Sloane had exchanged ‘letters and severale curiosities’. Sloane later wrote to Scheuchzer's father that he had ‘found upon tryall that he was very sober, modest, and diligent and therefore thought proper to keep him longer’. He had him elected to the Royal Society (for which he would eventually act as foreign correspondent) and examined at the Royal College of Physicians, both of which, Sloane told his father: will cost a good deal of money, but which is necessary on account of his present and future wellbeing. This I have done for your son as if he had been a very near relation and given him what is necessary for his support, without being troublesome to you and to put him in a very fair way to live happily if he continues sober modest and diligent, which I have no reason to doubt. I have formerly encouraged in some measure young gentlemen in these circumstances.51 Here we see how Sloane viewed his duty as a patron, bound to promote the interests of young men in public life, securing positions not just for those interested in natural history collecting, but also for aspiring medics, preachers, teachers and government officials.52 Such behaviour was justified and, indeed, expected from someone like Sloane. However, the visible extent of his resources, and this highly visible forthrightness when it came to managing them, whether human or material, was not always fully appreciated by other members, as revealed in the editor John Chamberlayne's letter to Sloane in 1713: were it True, as some of your Enemys have objected (for 'tis Impossible to be long in any society without having some Enemys) were it true, I say, that you Take too much upon you, that you Govern us, & even that you bestow Places upon your Creatures & induce the Society to enlarge the Salarys of their Officers, which is all that ever I heard objected against you, yet I think we ought even to connive at all this, rather than loose an old, Able & Experienced Officer who is the very Life & Soul of the Society, & who has thus long kept up the Honor & Dignity of it by his Personal Merit both Abroad & at Home.53 Sloane was regularly accused of cronyism and criticized for the perceived openness of the Philosophical Transactions during his time as secretary and president. Many felt he brought down the reputation of the Royal Society by skewing publication towards his own natural historical interests and correspondents. So the irascible astronomer John Flamsteed wrote in a letter to his friend in October 1704: ‘Our Society decays and produces nothing remarkable, nor is like to do it, I fear, whilst 'tis governed by persons that either value nothing but their own interests, or understand little but vegetables, and how, by making a bouncing noise, do cover their own ignorance’.54 Around the same time, Newton apparently received an anonymous report stating: ‘Twill not easily be imagin'd how greatly the Reputation of the Society, without doors, suffers upon that Account’.55 The Transactions became a critical site of vocalized disagreement within the Society as various groups fought for control of its management and public image.56 Discussing a recent row regarding a satirical pamphlet, The Transactioneer (1700), that attacked Sloane and others of the natural historical persuasion, John Woodward's friend wrote to the vice president of the Society in 1700: I was glad then to hear Dr Sloan declare openly that the Transactions were his Own & that he would publish in them only what he thought fit … It seems very needful that the Society should in Print declare that the Transactions are not Theirs, but the Secretary's. Something of this kind hath been formerly done, & there is now more need of it than ever, The Transactions having of late been very much censured & complain'd of, both by our own Country Men & Forreigners … For some very Curious & Ingenious Gentlemen have been deterred from communicating their Papers to the Society by the Bad Company they ^perceive they^ must keep, if published in the Transactions.57 This point was a contentious one, and Sloane seems to have gathered material evidence for his own defence. One example from his papers is a list of quotes headed ‘MR OLDENBURG, HIS DEDICATION OF THE 1ST VOL OF PH. TR. TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY, INTIMATES THAT THEY ARE HIS OWN PRIVATE WORK’. This is followed by three items: ‘Mr Waller, in the Preface ^to^ Ph. Tr. N.196 clears the Royal Society, which is no way concern'dtherein, from all Miscarriages he may possible commit [in publishing the Transactions]’; ‘Dr Hook, of his own account, published Phil. Collections, after the manner of the Ph. Transactions. He was not Secretary of the R. Society’; ‘In the Preface to the Ph. Tr. N.143 it is said that The Writing of the Transactions is not ^to be^ looked upon as the Business of the Royal Society’.58 The claim that Robert Hooke had not been secretary is, in fact, incorrect, but perhaps alludes to how differently he saw his position, and what he felt it required of him, to that of any similar figures before him. When Newton died in March 1727 and Sloane ascended to the presidency, he faced such a storm of opposition that another election had to be held that November, on St. Andrew's Day. Sloane defended himself with concentrated indifference: I have formerly done a great deal for the service of the Society, which I did by inclination very willingly, and even have continued it to this time, when my former services had render'd them less necessary … When I had the honour to be made President, I did what I could to make the Society and that design of their institution for great purposes known, and was going onto think of hindering the admission of members who did not deserve that respect, to employ members fit to prosecute their affairs with vigour, and to encourage foreigners or absent fit persons ^to help us^, that are here, with their observations, and did endeavour to show them by example that the officers of the society should every one in their place exert themselves, as I intended to do.59 Furthermore, he wrote, should the Society not seek to continue him in this position, ‘I shall at the same time, that I loose that honour, be rid of a great deal of trouble, & spend that time I have for many years allotted for their services, the best I can’.60 Scheuchzer leapt to his defence, again highlighting his personal endeavour and investment as a public service, and Sloane kept a copy of the letter: He served the Society as their Secretary for twenty years without ever asking or receiving one penny for his trouble. All the while he was Secretary, he carried on an extensive correspondence all over England and to all parts of Europe, at his sole expence. He likewise during all that time printed the transactions of the Royal Society at his own charges, which single article put him to the expence of no less than 1500 pound61 The epistemological and functional relationship between the early Royal Society and the Philosophical Transactions is a complex one as originally, according to Moxham, ‘knowledge claims in the Transactions had a different status from those to which the Society could credibly stand witness’.62 This accounts in part for its inconsistent content and handling after Oldenburg's death, as T. Christopher Bond noted: ‘gaps in publication and frequent changes of editor had almost completely eroded the credit Oldenburg had accumulated’.63 But in the early eighteenth century, as Moxham argued, ‘the combination of publishing distractions, financial difficulty and the inability to retain curators all added to the importance of the Transactions to the Society’ in the early eighteenth century.64 They stabilized under the secretaryships of Sloane and Edmund Halley who followed him (1713–21), as both used their extensive correspondence networks and good status to fill its pages. This helped to re-engineer the Society's image of institutional vitality and utility at a critical moment, a time when it was visibly weak and riven by dissent, struggling to iron out its finances and win back the support of its own members. Over time, this broke down the separation between the Philosophical Transactions and the Society's ‘official’ business: The distinction between the functions of registration and communication was finally effaced in the 1730s and 1740s, when the Society abandoned its practice of archiving letters (external communications) and papers (accounts delivered directly by Fellows or of experiments actually performed before the Society) in separate series … This new role collapsed what had once seemed an important distinction between letters and papers.65 Sloane's patronage and collection of both correspondents and objects was an integral part of this breakdown. Cultivated through his professional success and his private collecting interests, particularly in medicine, botany, natural history and antiquarianism, Sloane's personal reputation and visible networks were particularly valuable to the Society.66 He was renowned as a patron, someone with enough resources to assist, support and encourage a wide range of private endeavours, and his reputation for generosity ensured he had a constant stream of new correspondents and information, as when Sam Cole wrote in 1721: ‘I am told by severall persons that you make it part of your business to try ventures for your own satisfaction & that you are Concerned with other gentlemen in adventuring in foreign parts’.67 The botanist and surgeon, Patrick Blair, was encouraged to write to him in 1705 by one of Sloane's long-time correspondents, Charles Preston, who had told him Sloane was a great patron of learning and botany.68 When Sloane showed eagerness for his botanical manual, Blair sent him the manuscript, excusing himself: ‘The great disadvantages labour'd under … Being neither assisted in a Thought from any that were neer me, nor from any Correspondent at a distance, except Dr Preston whom I had but seldom the Opportunity to hear from, neither being furnished with Books, but such as I was obliged to purchase at my own charges’.69 As a successful physician and well-known naturalist, Sloane was constantly called upon to dispense books, papers and other materials to supply such a lack of resources, and this often won him life-long scholarly allegiance. In 1723, Blair dedicated his publication Phytozoon genealogia to Sloane: It is above 20 Years since I entreated the favour of a Correspondance with you … You readily granted and still entertain it with great Friendship and Civility adding severall other testimonys of your Favour and Countenance. You freely accepted of my Manuale Pharmaco-Botanologia an improvement of it you put such a value upon my Anatomical description of an Elephant that it compleats two Transactions of the Royal Society and it was you that first propos'd my being elected a member of that Illustrious Body when at a distance and unacquainted with its Fellows What discoverys and Improvements I design'd should be communicated to that Learned Assembly you always recommended them with such an Emphasis as obtain'd a special attention of the Auditory.70 By maintaining a healthy ambiguity between his own resources and those of the Society, Sloane was able to benefit both simultaneously: he enhanced his own reputation alongside that of the institution, accumulating credit by solving the problematic lack of resources for both his correspondents and the Royal Society. It was relatively easy (and cheap) to encourage intellectual endeavour in this way, and the potential rewards were immense. Publishing his correspondents in the Transactions, Sloane was able to provide both an outlet and a reward for the observations that a broad range of individuals around the country were making in their own interests. The physician and antiquary Robert Sibbald, for example, wrote to Sloane in 1702 to thank him and the Society for their recent interest regarding whale observations he had made a decade before, claiming that this action had inspired him to write more on the subject: once complete, he would dedicate the work to the Royal Society.71 It is possible that this had originally been spurred by the same dissection of a whale referred to in a letter from Charles Preston in July 1701.72 In 1733, Paulus Henricus Gerardus sent Sloane a drawing, thanking the Society for letting him become a member ‘and to you in particular … It is now a duty incumbent on me to communicate to the Royal Society from time to time any thing new and curious which may fall in my way: Therefore I now lay before them a draught and description of an Arithmetical Machine which I invented about 12 or 13 years ago’.73 By providing correspondents with the opportunity to bring forth and publish information and inventions that were otherwise lying gathering dust in private collections, Sloane was creating use out of otherwise dormant knowledge, and increasing the circulation of information, and his own reach. This ingratiated the Society to the individual concerned and brought more and more potentially useful contributors into the fold, both physically and through correspondence; many contributors responded to published reports and requested memberships for their learned friends or others to whom they owed gratitude. Keenly aware of both the individual and institutional benefits of encouraging such communication, Sloane actively canvassed for correspondents both privately and as secretary: The Royal Society are resolved to prosecute vigorously the whole design of their institution, and accordingly they desire you will be pleased to give them an account of what you meet with or hear of, that is curious in nature, or in any way tending to the advancement of natural knowledge, or useful arts. They in return will always be glad to serve you anything in their power74 Broadening out the subject matter encouraged a wider range of individuals to involve themselves with the Society, allowing them to contribute and capitalize without anxiety: Sir, I have not the honour to be acquainted with you, yet I have taken the freedom to send you a short Specimen of my Method of Quadratures applied to Mechanical Curves, that it may (if you think fit) be published in the Philosophical Transactions. Not but I am sensible enough of how far short it does fall of the worth of those curious Collections, which you do manage with so general satisfaction to all inquisitive men. This of mine being but small, the blemish it may bring upon the rest, will be the little or overlook'd.75 Through Sloane, the Society gave correspondents an easy way to establish and improve their own social credit. Particularly in the wake of the Act of Union and the South Sea Bubble, individuals and institutions alike had to build and advertise their public credit and financial probity in new ways. At a time when instruments of public credit were inciting much discussion within wider society, the use of reciprocity and the language of obligation within the Society's wider networks reinforced a culture in which everyone was constantly personally indebted to one another.76 The increased dissemination of private studies in the Transactions helped establish individuals' personal credit, build the Society's reputation, and make clear the links between individual endeavour and institutional utility. Adding one's intellectual stock to the ‘joynstock’ of the Royal Society made each correspondent a figurative shareholder in the scientific ‘company’, giving them the advantage of long-term reciprocal rights, responsibilities and loyalties.77 In return, the Society benefited from increased access to resources that could be called on to repay institutional debts or create further networks of obligation in the future. The active collection and publication of information regarding a wide range of private interests also helped, in turn, to create a public resource for the Society: it increased the circulation of economically and socially valuable materials between private donors while indirectly implying the Society had possession of them, increasing both their actual and their ‘semiotic’ value.78 Consequently, the Society was perceived to have a great stock of Fellows and correspondents well versed in a broad range of skills, who could be called upon and consulted over diverse and increasingly specialized topics. So Robert Steuart assumed regarding a design for a perpetual motion mechanism: You signify the Delivery of my book by Dr Oliphant to you, and your presenting it to the Royal Society; Their taking it to their consideration and deferring to one of their Number Sufficiently qualified for Judging of such undertakings … Whereby I can hardly express how much I am oblig'd to think, speak and act in promoting the Interest and Honour of your L. and Prudent Society, who has been pleas'd, by their kind Letter, to cherish me upon this head not such Degrees of Encouragement as was proper; For which, I return them all that is within the Compass of my power.79 Another example is when Robert Sibbald sent Sloane a figure of a fish, wondering if it was known by any other Fellow and, if so, whether they could provide him with its name and class.80 In this way, members of the Royal Society were used as a ‘collection’ in and of themselves, each with their own specialisms, interests, networks and resources, to be called upon by correspondents. Contacting or contributing to the Royal Society was increasingly seen as a way of connecting intellectual endeavours with specific audiences; its role became about facilitating exchange between interested individuals. In short, the Society itself was reconfigured as a single node within wider networks of collective and cumulative knowledge production. This was an extremely shrewd move, one which solved the Society's prevailing lack of financial, intellectual and human resources. Further, it allowed the institution to represent its utility in a different way to a wider society, speaking directly to the ‘culture of [polite] conversation’ – the increasingly commercial, self-conscious and fashionable culture of information creation, presentation and exchange that was being fostered by the coffeehouses and print culture of the time alongside the increasing awareness of social interdependency.81 Dániel Margócsy has argued that in the comparable context of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, the commodification of knowledge visibly shifted the goals for scientific representation from ‘convincing’ or establishing facts, to increasing access.82 This was also publicly reflected in the Transactions, as John Morton wrote in 1706: I thankfully acknowledge the favour of your last wherein you tell me you tell me [sic] you will print that letter of mine you read before the society; tho, I perceive, you cannot thoroughly agree with me as to my opinion there deliverd about the shells buryed in the moor. You print it, I know, because you think it will be serviceable to me in that respect of satisfying the world about the progress of my work; which undoubtedly it will.83 As Bond put it: ‘By refusing to wield a heavy editorial hand, even to the point of allowing contradictory statements to exist side-by-side, Sloane prompted a shift of responsibility – from the controlling editor to the self-critiquing scientific community’.84 The Royal Society's new (or, rather, renewed) emphasis on the epistolary and oral circulation of information also came to be reflected in what it looked for in its associates, as when Samuel Pepys recommended ‘Mr Monro’: ‘Mr Jackson tells mee ^hee believes^ may be truly usefull to the Society; adding, that besides his known urbanity & respectfullnesse as well as Communicativeness to all Strangers’.85 Ultimately, this was a product of Sloane's distinctive role within the Society in this period. Though Henry Oldenburg had also used his correspondence to encourage and publish the results of reciprocal exchange on behalf of the Society, Sloane's greater capacity for patronage – his wealth and status as a physician and collector – meant that his dependency on the Society was not so explicit, and he was able to represent his activities much more successfully in terms of sociable largesse and the deliberate cultivation of communication.86 Through Sloane's collections and correspondence, then, the perceived public role of the Royal Society in the early eighteenth century was shifting to the facilitation of diverse forms of individual inquiry through the increased circulation and dissemination of knowledge materials, and the connection of private resources. The Transactions reflected how materials were being exchanged across the Society's extended correspondence networks and helped create and expand obligation. In consequence, the Society's Repository was increasingly filled with the ‘indirectly solicited’ items that individuals had sent to the Society as part of this obligation, either to open correspondence with Sloane, to thank the Society for publication, or else immediately before or after their elections as Fellows.87 While the Transactions facilitated private exchange for public benefit by helping to move material around various epistolary networks, the Repository became a place to store ‘spares’ or non-vital objects, the accumulated material ‘credit’ of such productive exchange. In 1709, for example, the bishop of Kilmore, Edward Wetenhall, wrote to Sloane regarding an elk's head: ‘Before I came out of that desolate country Ireland I mett with what I thought might be an acceptable present to the royall Society to be added to their Rarities … Otherwise I shall dispose of the same ^to some friend^’.88 After all, these items could not really be thrown away. Though not used as often as the objects circulating in the Society's epistolary networks, these objects did not cease to be useful: they could be called upon to create further profitable alliances, creating a sense of shared intellectual endeavour without diverting important materials away from active inquiry. This is evident in a letter from Owen Lloyd, the secretary of the Dublin Philosophical Society (established in 1683), in 1695: We think our selves obliged to returne our Thanks for Your good inclinations to Us, & the Testimony you now give of them in the valuable Present of Your own Duplicates. We will omitt noe opportunity of making you sensible how much We esteem them, and wish We had anything worth your acceptance but hope that time may enable Us to make You Some returne in such naturall Raritys, as may be collected by the joint endeavours of so many of Us, a labour in these Discoverys, and assure Yourselfe that when nothing else can keep us together, the Memory of this Favour, with what We have receiv'd from the Illustrious Society will be able to do it.89 Whether the duplicates in question were Sloane's or the Society's (or both) is, of course, unclear. However, in 1697, William Molyneux sent to the Society ‘an octangle pillar taken from the Giant's Causeway’ in return for its offer ‘to bestow upon the Dublin Society such duplicates or Rarities as can be spared out of the Repository’.90 Sloane conducted similar exchanges with members of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh (established in 1681), particularly with Charles Preston and Robert Sibbald, who furnished the Transactions with news from the north, with their own institutional news and that of others on the Continent, and curiosities for both Sloane and the Royal Society.91 Indeed, it could be argued that the diminished role of the Repository was, in part, a response to the emergence of other institutional collections and shared repositories, something that only grew over the period as Fellows became involved in other scholarly ventures with similarly discursive scholarly structures, such as the establishment of the Society of Antiquaries in 1707, often with shared membership or correspondence networks and, therefore, resources. The Royal Society was understood by contemporaries in the early eighteenth century as a corporate institution made up of diverse individuals, all pursuing their own interests with their own resources, facilitated and supported by a collective scholarly structure. The fact that Sloane kept so many useful objects within his own collection was not unusual. As Marsigli reported home to Italy in 1721: ‘everyone studies and carries out tests at home and if they happen to need certain instruments of physic they go to Mr Desaguliers … When they have done, they set it down on paper to take it to the Society where the experiment is performed in the demonstration room, after which they take everything back home so no apparatus ever remains there’.92 The minutes of the ordinary meetings of the Society reveal that, more often than not in this period, objects were ‘shewn’ and then not deposited into the Repository but taken home again – still, the showing of them by the collector or finder meant that Fellows knew where to find them, if required. It is true, however, that this constant movement between individual and institutional collections did have some negative results, as when in 1700 ‘Dr Hook Moved the Councell that they would bestow on him the remains of a Quadrant contrived by himself but never finished, and many parts of it formerly being Lost whilst in the Custody of Sir Jonas Moor, and the remaining parts much detrimented by rust and bruises’.93 Otherwise, within this context the blending of personal and institutional resources was largely unproblematic. When it came to exchanging or gifting materials required for intensive classificatory or intellectual work, such as botanical specimens, it is true that private collections were privileged. It was private individuals who could best facilitate the widest and most efficient circulation of objects around the appropriate areas of their correspondence networks, thereby ensuring their best possible use by those with the most knowledge or ability. Sloane's rival John Woodward said as much when he wrote to Sloane in order to pass on ‘Duplicates of these 2 tracts’ from Dr. Zanichelli: ‘Yours being much the best Collection in this kind that I know, I thought they could not be better reposited than with you. If you happen to have them already, be pleased to give them to the Library of the Roy. Society’.94 This also explains why, as Jennifer Thomas has reported, when Philip Zollman made a present of a collection of fossils to the Society in December 1729, he asked that his donation be compared and named according to the fossils in Sloane's collection rather than those in the Society's.95 Zollman knew that Sloane's collection would have the most accurate cataloguing as they were the specimens with the widest possible circulation and amount of use. This did not mean, however, that there was not the intention of improving the Repository. Indeed, one condition of Sloane's gift of the Chelsea Physic Garden to the Society of Apothecaries in 1722 was that they supply the Royal Society with fifty specimens a year (accompanied by catalogues every year up until 1737), an arrangement that improved the fortunes of both societies considerably.96 As part of the swathe of internal reforms designed to clarify and consolidate the resources of the Society, highlighted above, intensive work was conducted throughout the first half of the eighteenth century in order to try and improve the content, organization and administration of their resources and, in so doing, demonstrate the renewed success of the Society.97 In a Council meeting of November 1700, Sloane ‘reported to the Society that all the Society's Books from the beginning to this are all brought up and that he has them in good order under his Custody’.98 Christopher Wren Jnr. wrote to Sloane in 1710: By my father's direction a Modell is made of the room for the Repository of the Royal Society in Crane Court, wch may give the Gentlemen a better idea, then the designe on paper. It will be very light, very commodious, and the cheapest building that can be contrived: I have sent the Joyner with it to you, that you may take the opportunity to show it to the Councill; it will be necessary not to loose the season of the year in the execution.99 Instead of remaining dark, poky, and smoke-grimed, the Repository was to be a place where people could meet comfortably to view objects in good light, something which had not been possible before. One of Sloane's correspondents, William Derham, first suggested the recataloguing of the Repository in a private letter in November 1712: Considering that few of us are well acquainted with the Repository, especially with such things as are out of sight in Boxes & Drawers, & under Locks & Keys: & considering also that the late Removeall of them, may in all probability have impaired some, displaced others, & lost others: & especially considering yt no man is able to give any account of many of them but Mr Hunt, who grows much in years, That therefore a Committee of the Society be appointed Strictly to respect the Repository: That they should be ordered to annex the Tithes and Donors to the Rarities; place them in so good an order; & make an Alphabetical Catalogue of them, yt every curious Inquirer may readily & easily search & have recourse to them. But if this would be too tedious, yt at least the Committee should go on where Dr Grew left off, & add what hath been brought in since. Besides the benefit this would make the Repository of to curious persons, it would moreover make some of our selves acquainted therewith; which would be of absolute necessity in case of Mr Hunts death; the loss of whom (without such a provision as this I have proposed) would be of fatal consequence to the Repository, he being, I imagine, the only man thoroughly acquainted therewith.100 Dereham's letter indicates a contemporary awareness of the need for collections to be easily accessed, widely disseminated and actively used in order to become better known and, therefore, useful. The more individuals who could use a collection, the more useful it would be, and so organizational knowledge needed to be separated from the possession of the individual in charge of the collection (whether that was the curator or the collector), and placed instead in a catalogue or some other form of paper record which could easily be used by a number of different individuals. Because the future use of the institutional collection needed to be guaranteed after the death of the individual curator or collector, power over and knowledge about that collection could not reside in that person alone – responsibility had to be spread out and set down. It took nearly twenty years – and Sloane's attainment of the presidency – before the Royal Society began to act upon this understanding in earnest. In July 1729, the Council ‘Resolved that the Secretaries be impowered to Employ and Bargain with proper Amanuenses to Compleat the Copies of the Register and Letter Books of the Society’.101 In the same meeting, the recently sworn-in vice-president, Edmund Halley, recommended ‘the Revival of the Committee for inspecting the Library and Repository, and proposed that the Gentlemen present at this Council be of the Committee with Dr Massey, Mr Martyn, Dr Mortimer and Such other members of the Society as shall be willing to assist them’. The Committee began work on 15 January 1730, and started to go through the collection object by object. They cross-referenced them with Grew's catalogue, marking out items ‘wanting’, ‘only part’, or ‘not mentioned by Grew’.102 After a few months, Francis Hauksbee presented the Council with a bill for his services in ‘sorting all the Original Letters to the Present time, in the order of the Alphabet and in order of time. And in Classifying all the other papers under proper heads according to the Method of Lowthorps Abridgment’.103 Meanwhile, Dr. Thomas Stack began work on cataloguing and indexing the letter books, and was later asked to compile inventories of books received and books and instruments lent out (and which needed to be returned).104 The Society's records were combed in order to create ‘A Compleate Catalogue of the Severall Donations of Manuscripts, printed Books, Naturall Curiosities, Machines & Antiquities Which have been presented to the Royal Society. Extracted from the Journal Books with the dates when given & the Donors names annexed’.105 Not only that, but the members tasked with going through each period of records were also recorded, as were the dates of records they were responsible for, clearly creating a further record of administrative intervention for future use or follow-up. This catalogue was created alongside the revision of Grew's 1681 catalogue, in which Cromwell Mortimer attempted to devise a whole new system of classification, as well as consolidate the content.106 The working copy of this is covered in many different hands as the Committee worked its way through the collection, sorting as they went. This manuscript reveals tantalizing traces of the energetic and necessarily haphazard joint effort: on the back of the page headed ‘Nuts’, upside down and crossed out, is the draft of the ‘Insects’ page, and there is one section headed ‘Dubious?’ Further, on the bottom of one catalogue page is pasted: Mem. That on December the 18 1673 The Secretary presented in the name of Sig. Paolo Boccone, a Sicilian Botanist, a Collection of Curiosities which as it consists of ^A Miscellaneous Collection^ Fruits Stones Minerals Fishes Plants and all contained in three Boxes only I could not adjust under the proper Heads Therefore though proper to give this Notice ^as^ to what times they were given to the Society in Case the Boxes should be discovered on Examining the Repository.107 In both, the provenance of objects, the donors and the dates of donation are very clearly marked out, with paper slips of further information added at a later date, and dotted lines to make sure objects are sufficiently associated with provenance. There is also evidence of the compilers experimenting with the layout of this information in order to ensure the best and most accurate recording, both of those who could be considered human resources and those who could provide access to wider collections or connections. Clearly, the Repository was becoming a collection of credit. While a good deal of the items had been lost or broken since Grew had made his catalogue, many of them required intensive restoration or preservation work. The precise way of doing this was discussed at length: ‘The consideration of preserving the curiosities being resumed, it was agreed that the whole Room ought to be new White washt and painted and that most of the books ought to be preserved in the same manner as was agreed on last week for the shells and fossils’.108 A few months later, the minutes recorded that: In considering of a proper method to preserve the Curiosities of the Repository, 'twas proposed that the parts of animals which are capable of it should be Varnished that the preserved bones should be cleaned and skeletons mended if not remounted. That the animal stones should be affixed to boards covered with glass so as not to be handled. That the shells and fossils should be carefully cleaned and laid in a Cabinet with Drawers and those whose size will not admit of Drawers should be placed behind Glass Doors. 'Twas thought reasonable that what shall be presented for the future and what is here already not yet well figured by any author ought to be drawn.109 Various individuals known for their skills in managing collections were engaged to help in such work, such as Dr. Thomas Stack and Dr. Cromwell Mortimer, who had both worked on Sloane's private collections.110 Mortimer was a good friend, and had moved from Hanover Square to Bloomsbury Square at Sloane's request in 1729 in order to aid in their preservation and organization.111 He was also, largely thanks to Sloane, acting secretary to the Royal Society from 1730 until his death, and became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Gentleman's Society of Spalding. Yet, despite the fact that he was a trusted handler of collections (and, indeed, friend), Mortimer was still required to check his proposed methods for preservation with Sloane before acting upon them, as were all who engaged in such work for the Society, indicating that cronyism only went so far, and that Sloane's management of his human resources was based more on the proof of administrative skill.112 It was a huge logistical undertaking, requiring the removal of large skeletons for delivery to private dwellings around London for cleaning, such as the ostrich delivered to Mr. Mead in June 1730, alongside the movement in and out of the space of countless smaller objects, as when ‘Mr Jackson brought back forty three large shells, wch he had to clean & new polish, & was desired to polish sixty one middle sized shells. 20 of these are those mentione'd in the last Minutes, & he had 20 more deliver'd to him by Mr Hauksbee since that meeting wch were all now returned’.113 Yearly reports were made on the progress of this committee to the wider Council, right up until its final meeting on the 30 October 1733. Whitewashing, wainscotting, and refurnishing the Repository required payment, as did a lot of the cataloguing and preservation work, and this being done surprisingly promptly was clearly considered to be an urgent investment in the future use of the collection. Rather than the ‘passive’ attitude and ‘lack of initiative’ outlined by Thomas (who was focusing, as most discussions surrounding early modern collecting practices do, on the Society's explicit strategies for collecting), these reports and records reveal that a good deal of detailed work was conducted in order to clarify and consolidate the collection, and therefore expand its utility. Internal reforms such as this were designed to improve the links between the different elements which contemporaries understood were required for a successful scholarly society hinted at by Charlett: physical and figurative spaces for discussion, wide correspondence, large collections, individual investment, internal organization and accurate administrative records. They also demonstrate a subtle shift in institutional priorities and practice, a clear contemporary awareness that the Society's broader aim, in the words of Hunter, ‘to build up a complete and accurate description of the natural world through the accumulation of particulars’ could only be conducted through the co-ordination, communication and preservation of private endeavours.114 The Society's appreciation of individual interest and specialized knowledge grew throughout the early eighteenth century and, in 1731, Sloane sought to restructure oral discussion within the Society accordingly: The President offered it as his opinion that it might prove to great Advantage to the Society, if the Several Members were distributed into Classes according to the Several branches of knowledge in which they were most eminent, and to form Committees to Seat at Stated times to consider their respective subjects the consideration of which was referred to another opportunity.115 This understanding of the importance of private interests and resources may also account for why Sloane did not put more effort into developing the Society's collecting strategies: Sloane's power as a private individual and his refusal to confer his personal resources wholly on to the Society, but rather facilitate inquiry by connecting the combined resources of individuals and institutions, is a peculiar feature of scientific administration in this period. In order to survive and flourish in an increasingly commercial context, the Royal Society had to alter the representation of its public role, becoming a critical connector of resources and facilitator of diverse and increasingly specialized forms of inquiry. This is partly why objects described in the Philosophical Transactions were more than likely to be held in Sloane's collection, or that of another collector. It was not an issue of possession or authority, necessarily. Rather, it was because contemporaries understood all of these spaces to be linked. Again, this became increasingly reflected in the administration and reform of the Royal Society: in December 1713, for example, a meeting of the Council decided ‘that the same person should officiate as Clerk who should now be Housekeeper, Keeper of the Repository and Library’. The salary of the person chosen was to be £30 per annum and 6d for every page he copied of minutes, papers, and letters. At the same meeting Mr. Alban Thomas, who was then twenty-seven years of age, was appointed.116 Objects in collections and libraries were understood to be connected through the same correspondence networks that similarly linked most areas of social, scholarly and professional metropolitan life in the early modern world. Someone like Sloane, who had visible access to a range of commercial, cultural and intellectual spaces, was therefore a powerful figure: he was understood to have the strongest understanding of how knowledge could circulate between all of them. Indeed, it was his extensive personal connections that allowed him to support the Society in the way he did, as when in 1703 he informed the Council that ‘a Register book of the Society having been missing for some years he had found it being offered him for sale, & that he had stopped it. The Council desired him to take care to procure it for the Society’.117 His creative use of his correspondence networks meant that his power and that of the Royal Society were conflated, as when the first earl of Essex, William Capell, wrote to Lady Midleton: ‘My Dear Sister, The Round Box that is amongst the Glass's is a Curiosity. I beg you will give Sir Hans Slone from me, and no whats the Opinion of the Royal Society upon itt, its like a Flower and growes as you see itt in the Water. Aske him if he ever he saw any one like itt before’.118 Indeed, the collections were so much considered the same that Archibald Pitcairn had to specifically state in his letter that a stone from the Elb River he was sending was for Sloane personally, and not the Royal Society.119 The personal and private resources of members of the Royal Society were deeply entwined and understood by contemporaries to interact productively with one another through correspondence. Contemporaries used individual and institutional collections for different purposes, and this changed the perception and purpose of the Repository in the early eighteenth century, from ‘a physical storehouse of [universal] knowledge’ to the icon and tool of a successful, useful and faciliatory scientific society. Footnotes 1 Sloane gave over 1,500 titles to the Bodleian between 1700 and 1740, as detailed by W. Poole, ‘Francis Lodwick, Hans Sloane, and the Bodleian Library’, The Library, vii (2006), 377–418. 2 R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford, iv: the Philosophical Society (Oxford, 1925). 3 British Library, Sloane MS. 4036, fo. 277, Charlett to Hans Sloane, 8 Oct. 1696. 4 For the importance of desiderata in early modern scientific thought, see V. Keller, ‘The “New world of sciences”: the temporality of the research agenda and the unending ambitions of science’, Isis, ciii (2012), 727–34; V. Keller, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (New York, 2015). 5 Sloane MS. 4036, fo. 30, Tancred Robinson to Hans Sloane, 5 Dec. 1687. 6 Sloane MS. 4036, fos. 226–7, Richard Waller to Hans Sloane, n.d. Sept. 1696. 7 A. McConnell, ‘L. F. Marsigli's visit to London in 1721, and his report on the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, xlvii (1993), 187. 8 London in 1710: from the Travels of Zacharias Von Uffenbach, trans. and ed. W. H. Quarrel and M. Mare (1934), pp. 98–9. 9 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667), Early English Books Online <http://eebo.chadwyck.com> [accessed 11 July 2017]. 10 M. Hunter, Establishing the New Science: the Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 124, 139, 149–154. 11 London in 1710, p. 98. 12 G. S. Rousseau and D. Haycock, ‘Voices calling for reform: the Royal Society in the mid-18th century – Martin Folkes, John Hill, and William Stukeley’, Hist. of Science, xxxvii (1999), 377–406; G. S. Rousseau and D. Haycock, ‘The Jew of Crane Court: Emanuel Mendes Da Costa (1717–91), natural history and natural excess’, Hist. of Science, xxxviii (2000), 127–70; G. S. Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: the Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, 2002); R. Coulton, ‘“The Darling of the Temple Coffee-House Club”: science, sociability, and satire in early 18th-century London’, Jour. Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxxv (2012), 43–65; B. M. Benedict, ‘Collecting trouble: Sir Hans Sloane's literary reputation in 18th-century Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Life, xxxvi (2012), 111–42. 13 J. Thomas, ‘Compiling “God's Great Book [of] Universal Nature”: the Royal Society's collecting strategies’, Jour. Hist. of Collections, xxiii (2011), 7. 14 A. Rusnock, ‘Correspondence networks and the Royal Society, 1700–50’, British Jour. History of Science, xxxii (1999), 155–69; D. P. Miller, ‘“Into the valley of darkness”: reflections on the Royal Society in the 18th century’, Hist. of Science, xxvii (1989), 155–66, at p. 157; R. Sorrensen, ‘Towards a history of the Royal Society in the 18th century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, l (1996), 29–46; R. Sorrenson, ‘George Graham, visible technician’, British Jour. for the History of Science, xxxii (1999), 203–21; P. Fontes da Costa, ‘The culture of curiosity at the Royal Society in the first half of the 18th century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, lvi (2002), 147–66; A. Guerrini, ‘Anatomists and entrepreneurs in early 18th-century London’, Jour. Hist. of Medicine and Allied Sciences, lix (2004), 219–39; P. Fontes da Costa, The Singular and the Making of Knowledge at the Royal Society of London in the 18th Century (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2009). 15 M. Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows, 1660–1700: the Morphology of a Scientific Institution (Chalfont St. Giles, 1984); N. Moxham, ‘Fit for print: developing an institutional model of scientific periodical publishing in England, 1665 – ca.1714’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, lxix (2015), 241–60. 16 D. S. Lux and H. J. Cook, ‘Closed circles or open networks? Communicating at a distance during the scientific revolution’, Hist. of Science, xxxvi (1998), 179–211; D. A. Kronick, ‘The commerce of letters: networks and “invisible colleges” in 17th- and 18th-century Europe’, Library Quart., lxxi (2001), 28–43. 17 R. K. Bluhm, ‘Remarks on the Royal Society's finances, 1660–1768’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, xiii (1958), 83, citing Royal Society (hereafter R.S.), AB/1/1/1–12. 18 H. Lyons, The Royal Society 1660–1940 (Cambridge, 1944), p. 110. 19 John Flamsteed to Richard Towneley, 13 Feb. 1680, quoted in Hunter, Establishing the New Science, p. 255. 20 Lyons, p. 127; P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (1967), p. 183. 21 Bluhm, p. 98. 22 A. MacGregor, ‘Sloane, Sir Hans, baronet (1660–1753)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/25730> [accessed 7 March 2017]; From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections, ed. A. Walker, A. MacGregor and M Hunter (2012); J. Delbourgo, Collecting the World: the Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (2017). 23 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4026, fo. 270, J. G. Scheuchzer, ‘Letter on Sloane's canditure for president of the Royal Society’, imperfect draft, n.d. 24 Bluhm, p. 98. 25 M. Yakup Bektas and M. Crosland, ‘The Copley medal: the establishment of a reward system in the Royal Society, 1731–1838’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, xlvi (1992), 43–76 (author's italics). Upon Abraham Hill's death, Sloane also acquired Copley's commonplace books. 26 R. E. W. Maddison, ‘Abraham Hill, F. R. S. (1635–1722)’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, xv (1960), 173–82. 27 Lyons, pp. 127–8. 28 R.S., CMO/3/15, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 17 July 1729. While this action might at first glance be seen to prejudice some of the poorer members of the Society, alienating those further down the socio-economic scale by restricting access, there seems conversely to have been a high level of flexibility when dealing with such members. John Douglas and the Rvd. James Bradley, for example, R.S., CMO/3/33, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 14 Dec. 1730. See also R.S., CM/3/34, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 26 Jan. 1731. 29 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4026, fo. 203, John Thorpe to Hans Sloane, 16 Aug. 1711; Sloane MS. 4043, fo. 131, John Thorpe to Hans Sloane, 17 March 1712. 30 L. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 132. 31 H. W. Robinson, ‘The administrative staff of the Royal Society, 1663–1861’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, iv (1946), 193–205, at p. 196. 32 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 150, Jezreel Jones to Hans Sloane, 2 Apr. 1701. 33 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 154, Jezreel Jones to Hans Sloane, 7 Apr. 1701. 34 R.S., JBO/10, fo. 130. 35 R.S., JBO/10, fos. 97, 100; J. Petiver, Musei Petiveriani centuria VIII (1700), p. 68. 36 Natural History Museum, Botany Library, Hans Sloane, ‘Vegetables And Vegetable Substances: Volume 1: Specimen Numbers 1 To 3000’ (1687–1753?). The author is indebted to Victoria Pickering for finding this entry. See also V. R. M. Pickering, ‘Putting nature in a box: Hans Sloane's “Vegetable Substances” collection’ (unpublished Queen Mary University of London Ph.D. thesis, 2016); Robinson. 37 R.S., MS/414, catalogue of the Repository of the R.S. (c.1720–40); N. Grew, Museum Regalis Societatis: Or, a Catalogue and Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society, And Preserved at Gresham College Museum (1681). 38 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4037, fo. 357, Jezreel Jones to Hans Sloane, 13 Dec. 1699; R.S., JBO/10, fo. 155. 39 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4059, fo. 199, Jezreel Jones to Hans Sloane, n.d.; Sloane MS. 4063, fo. 67, Jezreel Jones to James Petiver, 23 Feb. 1701. 40 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 144, Jezreel Jones to Hans Sloane, 15 March 1701; Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 150, Jezreel Jones to Hans Sloane, 2 Apr. 1702; Sloane MS. 4063, fo. 76, Jezreel Jones to James Petiver, 2 Apr. 1702; Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 154, Jezreel Jones to Hans Sloane, 7 Apr. 1702. 41 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4063, fo. 76, Jezreel Jones to James Petiver, 2 Apr. 1702. 42 R.S., JBO/10, fo. 219. 43 R.S., JBO/10, fo. 243. 44 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4003, fos. 17–24, ‘Collection of Productions of Barbary with Drawings, 1701, 1711’. Albin also made copies of Jones's originals of Barbary insects (see A. W. Franks's unpublished copy of Sloane's ‘Miscellanies’ catalogue (n.d.), in British Museum, Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory; P. M. Jones, ‘A preliminary check-list of Sir Hans Sloane's catalogues’, British Library Jour., xiv (1988), 38–51). Sloane even kept hold of materials concerning the failed British assault on Cadiz, including the examination of Sir Stafford Fairborne, a naval officer and friend of Robert Southwell whom Jones initially engaged to send Sloane his collection (see Sloane MS. 2496, fo. 42–54). 45 J. Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 1998). 46 M. Knights, ‘Corruption, party and government in Britain, 1702–13, by Aaron Graham’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxxxii (2017), 392–3. See also C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998); M. Knights, ‘Samuel Pepys and corruption’, Parl. Hist., xxxiii (2014), 19–35. 47 Robinson, p. 198. 48 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4037, fo. 61, Arthur Charlett to Hans Sloane, 17 Apr. 1698. 49 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 314, Humfrey Wanley to Hans Sloane, 17 Apr. 1698. 50 A. Blakeway, ‘The library catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: their authors, organisation, and functions’, Electronic Brit. Libr. Jour. (2011), 1–49 <http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/article16.html> [accessed 29 Nov. 2018]. 51 G. R. de Beer, 'Johann Gaspar Scheuchzer, F.R.S., 1702–29, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vi (1948), 63–4; M. E. Jahn, ‘John Woodward, Hans Sloane, and Johann Gaspar Scheuchzer: a re-examination’, Jour. Society for the Bibliography of Natural Hist., vii (1974), 19–27. 52 For just a few examples, see Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4036, fo. 124, Abraham Hill to Hans Sloane, 30 May 1692; Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 20, R. Morton to Hans Sloane, 11 June 1700; Sloane MS. 4047, fo. 151, Christopher Keon to Hans Sloane, 16 March 1724; Sloane MS. 4048, fo. 231, William Stukeley to Hans Sloane, 6 Dec. 1726; Sloane MS. 4051, fo. 117, John Eade to Hans Sloane, 3 Oct. 1730; Sloane MS. 4052, fo. 128, Horatio Walpole to Hans Sloane, 10 June 1732. 53 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4043, fos. 195–6, John Chamberlayne to Hans Sloane, 19 Oct. 1713. 54 John Flamsteed to Abraham Sharp, 21 Oct. 1704, quoted in An Account of the Reverend John Flamsteed, the First Astronomer Royal, ed. F. Baily (1835), p. 218. 55 A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, Ill., 1998), p. 596. 56 D. Haycock, ‘“The Cabals of a Few Designing Members”: the presidency of Martin Folkes, PRS, and the Society's first charter’, Antiquaries Jour., lxxx (2000), 273–84; T. C. Bond, ‘Keeping up with the latest transactions: the literary critique of scientific writing in the Hans Sloane years’, Eighteenth-Century Life, xxii (1998), 1–17. 57 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4026, fo. 253, John Harris to John Hoskins, 27 Feb. 1700. A copy of this letter is also found in Petiver's manuscript collection (Sloane MS. 3334, fos. 57–8). 58 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4026, fo. 300. 59 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4026, fo. 338, 20 Nov. 1727. 60 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4026, fo. 338, Hans Sloane to unknown [though probably Jean Gaspard Scheuchzer from contents], 20 Nov. 1727. 61 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4026, fo. 270, Jean Gaspard Scheuchzer, ‘Letter on Sloane's Canditure for President of the Royal Society’, imperfect draft, n.d. 62 Moxham, ‘Fit for print’, p. 252. 63 Bond, p. 2. 64 Moxham, ‘Fit for print’, p. 253. 65 Moxham, ‘Fit for print’, p. 253. 66 A. Marples and V. R. M. Pickering, ‘Patron's Review: Exploring cultures of collecting in the early modern world’, Archives of Natural History, xliii (2016), 1–20; J. Delbourgo, ‘Listing people’, Isis, ciii (2012), 735–42. 67 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4046, fo. 124, Sam Cole to Hans Sloane, 23 Aug. 1721. 68 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4040, fo. 66, Patrick Blair to Hans Sloane, 10 Sept. 1705. See also K. James, ‘The public performance of natural history’, in From Books to Bezoars, pp. 41–7. 69 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4040, fo. 92, Patrick Blair to Hans Sloane, 22 Nov. 1705. 70 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4020, fo. 9. For the letters concerning the elephant, see Sloane MS. 4040, fo. 169, Patrick Blair to Hans Sloane, 24 May 1706; Sloane MS. 4040, fo. 174, P. Blair to Hans Sloane, 8 June 1706; Patrick Blair, ‘Osteographia Elephantina: Or, a full and exact description of all the bones of an elephant’, Philosophical Tran., xxvii (1710), 53–168; P. Blair, ‘A description of the organ of hearing in the elephant’, Philosophical Trans., xxx (1717), 885–98. 71 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4039, fo. 26, Robert Sibbald to Hans Sloane, 10 Sept. 1702. 72 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 195, Charles Preston to Hans Sloane, 22 July 1701. 73 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4026, fos. 9–15, Paulus Henricus Gerardus Moehring to Hans Soane, received 6 Dec. 1733. 74 Quoted in Lyons, p. 107 (author's italics). 75 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4036, fo. 348, John Craig to Hans Sloane, 30 Aug. 1697. 76 M. C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003); J. Smail, ‘Credit, risk, and honor in 18th-century commerce’, Jour. British Studies, xliv (2005), 439–56; A. Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2015). 77 A. L. Murphy, The Origins of the English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation Before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 7, 43; J. Sheehan and D. Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organisation and the 18th Century (Chicago, Ill., 2015), ch. 3. 78 Cf. P. Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. R. Nice (2010); K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. E. Wiles-Portier (Cambridge, 1990). 79 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4042, fo. 100, Robert Steuart to Hans Sloane, 16 Feb. 1710; Sloane MS. 4068, fo. 56, Hans Sloane to Robert Steuart, 18 Jan. 1709. 80 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4043, fo. 56, Robert Sibbald to Hans Sloane, 29 Oct. 1709. 81 A. N. Walters, ‘Conversation pieces: science and politeness in 18th-century England’, History of Science, xxxv (1997), 121–54; L. Stewart, ‘Other centres of calculation, or, where the Royal Society didn't count: commerce, coffee-houses and natural philosophy in early modern London’, British Jour. History of Science, xxxii (1999), 133–53; Guerrini, ‘Anatomists and entrepreneurs’; B. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: the Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, Conn., 2008). 82 D. Margócsy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, Ill., 2014). 83 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4040, fo. 202, John Morton to Hans Sloane, 7 Aug. 1706. 84 Bond, p. 3; T. Broman, ‘Periodical literature’, in Books and the Science in History, ed. M. Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine (Cambridge, 2000); M. Ellis, ‘Thomas Birch's “Weekly Letter” (1741–66): correspondence and history in the mid-18th century Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, lxviii (2014), 261–78. 85 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4038, fo. 72, Samuel Pepys to Hans Sloane, 18 Jan. 1700. 86 N. Moxham, ‘Authors, editors and newsmongers: form and genre in the Philosophical Transactions under Henry Oldenburg’, in News Networks in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. Raymond and N. Moxham (Leiden, 2016). 87 Thomas, p. 6. 88 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4043, fo. 38, Edward Wetenhall to Hans Sloane, 27 Sept. 1709. 89 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4036, fo. 209, Owen Lloyd to Hans Sloane, 7 May 1695. 90 Fontes da Costa, ‘Culture of curiosity’, p. 159. 91 E.g., Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4037, fo. 289, Robert Sibbald to Hans Sloane, 13 June 1699. 92 McConnell, p. 192. 93 R.S., CMO/2/142, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the Royal Society, 20 Nov. 1700. 94 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4044, fo. 86, John Woodward to Hans Sloane, 19 Aug. 1715. 95 Thomas, p. 7. 96 The Chelsea Physic Garden's similar focus on administration and expansion during this time might be said to reflect common concerns, purposes and personnel (P. Hunting, ‘Isaac Rand and the apothecaries' garden at Chelsea’, Garden History, xxx (2002), 1–23). 97 Hunter, Establishing the New Science, p. 154. 98 R.S., CMO/2/142, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 20 Nov. 1700. 99 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4042, fo. 263, Christopher Wren Jnr. to Hans Sloane, 23 March 1710. 100 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4043, fo. 111, William Derham to Hans Sloane, 21 Nov. 1712 (author's italics). 101 R.S., CMO/3/14, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 3 July 1729. 102 R.S., CMB/63/8, minutes of a meeting of the Repository committee of the R.S., 12 March 1730. 103 R.S., CMO/3/20, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 20 Jan. 1729/1730. 104 R.S., CMO/3/55, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 18 Feb. 1733/1734. See also R.S., CMO/3/73, minutes of a meeting of the council of the R.S., 13 Sept. 1737. 105 R.S., MS/416, catalogue of the Repository of the R.S. (1731). 106 R.S., MS/414, catalogue of the Repository of the R.S. (c.1720–40); Grew, Museum Regalis Societatis; Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 2346, fo. 21. See also Sloane MS. 1927; Hunter, Establishing the New Science, p. 154. 107 R.S., MS/416, catalogue of the Repository of the R.S. (1731). 108 R.S., CMB/63/1, minutes of a meeting of the Repository committee of the R.S., 15 Jan. 1730. 109 R.S., CMB/63/13, minutes of a meeting of the Repository committee of the R.S., 30 Apr. 1730. 110 Blakeway, ‘The library catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane’. 111 F. W. Gibbs, ‘Cromwell Mortimer, F.R.S: Secretary, Royal Society, 1730–52’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vii (1950), 260. 112 R.S., CMB/63/19, minutes of a meeting of the Repository committee of the R.S., 25 June 1730. In 1733, Sloane invited committee members to his house ‘in order to view the manner of preserving & ranging of severall sorts’ (see R.S., CMB/63/60, minutes of a meeting of the Repository committee of the R.S., 8 May 1733). 113 R.S., CMB/63/19, minutes of a meeting of the Repository committee of the R.S., 25 June 1730; R.S., CMB/63/25, minutes of a meeting of the Repository committee of the R.S., 13 Aug. 1730. 114 Hunter, Establishing the New Science, p. 139. 115 R.S., CM/3/42, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 14 Dec. 1731. 116 Robinson, p. 199. 117 R.S., CMO/2/151, minutes of a meeting of the Council of the R.S., 21 Apr. 1703. 118 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4066, fo. 295, William Capell to Lady Middleton, n.d. 119 Brit. Libr., Sloane MS. 4038, fos. 246–7, Archibald Pitcairne to Hans Sloane, 29 Sept. 1701. © 2018 The Authors This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited © 2018 The Authors
TI - Scientific administration in the early eighteenth century: reinterpreting the Royal Society's Repository
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/1468-2281.12257
DA - 2019-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/scientific-administration-in-the-early-eighteenth-century-cgla2lSmUZ
SP - 183
EP - 204
VL - 92
IS - 255
DP - DeepDyve
ER -