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In Discours de la méthode, Descartes offered an explanation of the rainbow.

Long before the scientific article made its first appearance in the late seventeenth century, there were books. Without question, books and not articles communicated the new revelations about the natural world that spawned the scientific revolution. Among those making the honor roll in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one would have to include Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Bacon's Novum organum, Kepler's Dioptice, Galileo's Sidereus nuncius, Descartes's Discours de la méthode, and Newton's Principia.

Although by the eighteenth century, the article had advanced from an insignificant competitor of the book to a serious rival in the communication of new science, books remained an important means of scientific communication well into the nineteenth century. While at times endangered, even in the twentieth century the book has not become extinct as means for reporting original research findings or making a contribution to theory. George Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection and David Lack's Darwin's Finches, for example, are twentieth-century books relating ground-breaking evolutionary biology.

Image Gallery -- Landmark Books

Learned letters and essays

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Galileo's 1613 study of sunspots blends text and images.

Besides books, the other major predecessor and rival for communicating new science in the seventeenth century is the "learned letter," most famously illustrated by Galileo's letters on sunspots and the orbits of the planets. As the ideas of the scientific revolution spread in England and the Continent, the accelerated pace of scientific activity compelled natural philosophers to communicate their recent findings through personal correspondence within and between countries. Such letters were not personal messages to friends or colleagues, but an essay-like medium to expound on recent experiments and observations concerning the nature of things to others interested in such matters. To disseminate the information in these learned letters more efficiently, industrious scholars became centers for spreading the latest technical news at home and abroad. Their job was to receive letters, make copies, and pass them on to other interested scholars. After the emergence of scientific societies, the job of "trafficker in intelligence" became more formalized in that the societies themselves appointed a secretary to handle correspondence and transmit newsworthy learned letters to society members and friends.

	Noted Scientists, 15th-17th Centuries
	Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) Polish astronomer whose work overturned the geocentric theory of the universe. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) English philosopher and essayist best known for his work Novum organum. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Italian astronomer, mathematician and physicist. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) German astronomer who formulated three laws of planetary motion. René Descartes (1596-1650) French philosopher, mathematician and scientist. Reproduced with permission from The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Copyright © 2000 Columbia University Press. All Rights Reserved.

One such letter was penned in 1644 by Evangelista Torricelli, assistant to Galileo and father of hydrodynamics, and addressed to Michelangelo Ricci, a Roman cardinal and patron of science. After a typical flowery salutation of the day, Torricelli opens by briefly mentioning the whereabouts of another learned letter he had written on an entirely different topic, a mathematical proof, and sent to someone else. From that personal tidbit of information he jumps to an introductory-type discussion concerning past vacuum experiments and conjectures, which includes the vivid metaphor ,"We live immersed in the bottom of a sea of elemental air..."

Torricelli wrote his learned letter at a time when Aristotle's view that a vacuum could not exist still had currency, particularly among some powerful Jesuit theologians. So he cleverly skirts that controversial issue by arguing at the beginning that some deny the existence of a vacuum, others do not, but of the latter group, no one has denied that it exists in nature without "difficulty": he thus had conducted some experiments to determine whether or not the weight of air caused the resistance of nature to a vacuum, in case one indeed existed.

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A flea from Hooke's Micrographia.

The letter never really disappeared as a medium of scientific communication: personal letters between scientists remain a vital element in any historical reconstruction of their science. And as indicated by the letters in Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters, and other contemporary journals, the published letter is still a significant medium of scientific communication. Moreover, the link between the learned letter and the article is direct: many of the articles in the very first journals are learned letters lightly revised for publication by an editor. This was the case with Newton's famous first article on optics, published in the 1672 Philosophical Transactions. Also important during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were books containing collected letters or short articles on technical matters by a single author, as exemplified by Leeuwenhoek's published letters to the Royal Society of London and Hooke's splendidly illustrated Micrographia.