First English journal and the Royal Society

Univ. of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

Representation of two fetuses establishing a cause for their demise--a knot in the umbilical cord.

It was in March 1665 that Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society of London, launched the first English scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions. His transactions reported on technical news from abroad, as well as articles presented at the Royal Society and experiments performed there--or in the words on the title page, "Giving some accompt (sic) of the present undertakings, studies, and labours of the ingenious in many considerable parts of the world." The initial transactions, issued monthly, were about 20 pages long and printed in runs of 1,200 copies. The first issue had contributions from, among others, the eminent scientist and Royal Society Fellow Robert Hooke, an astronomer, an "inquisitive Physician," and an "understanding and hardy Seaman." This modest yet historic first issue concluded with an obituary for the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat. The author index under Oldenburg's stewardship (1665-1677) reads like a who's who of seventeenth-century scientists in England and Europe: Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Wren, Leeuwenhoek, Huygens, Hevelius, Leibnitz, Cassini, and Halley.

Oldenburg's journal was unofficially associated with the Royal Society, and its members and their friends in Europe were the main contributors. According to Bishop Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667), society members sought to reject "amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style...bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits and Scholars."

Despite Sprat's distrust regarding "this trick of Metaphor, this volubility of Tongue," some early science writers did manage to make effective use of it. Take the following metaphorically rich botanical description by Martin Lister, a physician with a keen interest in entomology and botany, as well as a frequent early contributor to Philosophical Transactions.

In the middle of July, I drew and gathered of the Milk of Lactuca syl. Costa spinosa, C.B. and of all our English Plants, that I have met with, this most freely and plentifully affords it. It springs out of the Wound thick as Cream and Ropes, and is White, and yet the Milk which came out of the Wounds, made towards the top of the Plant, was plainly streaked or mixt with a purple Juice, as though one had dashed or sprinkled Cream with a few drops of Claret. And indeed, the Skin of the Plant thereabouts was purplish also, perhaps with Veins. Again, in the Shell I drew it, it turned still yellower and thicker, and by and by curdled, that is, the white and thick caseous part did separate from a thin purple Whey. So the Blood also of Animals, whilst warm remains liquid and alike, but so soon as cold, it cakes and has a Serum or Whey separated from it; the Cake is made of glutinous Fibers, and therefore if the hot or new drawn Blood be well stirred or beaten, it will not break.

While Philosophical Transactions has seen writing styles come and go, it has maintained its emphasis on "Mathematical plainness" and is still going strong today.

First French journals and Académie Royale
The other major learned journal from the seventeenth century, Journal des sçavans, was started in January 1665 by Denis de Sallo. Before starting this weekly journal, Sallo had copyists transcribe especially interesting passages from books and letters so that he could quickly access information on a broad range of topics. Recognizing that other scholars might also profit from this diverse stockpiling of information, this polymath decided to publish weekly book reviews and news in science, as well as in law and theology. Because the Journal des sçavans began primarily as a review of technical and other scholarly works, some scholars bestow the honor of "first" scientific journal on Philosophical Transactions, even though Sallo founded his journal two months earlier. In Sallo's own words, his journal was instituted "for the relief of those either too indolent or too occupied to read whole books. It is a means of satisfying curiosity and of becoming learned with little trouble." Under the editorship of Sallo and his successors, the journal reported some of the most important discoveries in the world of seventeenth-century European science, including Huygens's undulating theory of light and Roemer's measurement of its velocity.

Before his fellow members of the French Académie Royale on September 1676, the Danish-born Ole Roemer predicted that the eclipse of one of the moons of Jupiter would occur on November 9, 1676, at 5 hours, 35 minutes, and 45 seconds; that is to say, exactly ten minutes after the time computed on the basis of an instantaneous speed of light. Roemer used the regular pattern in his observed discrepancies in the time for the eclipses of a moon of Jupiter (Io) over time to argue that they resulted because light has a definite speed. As this moon and the earth grew farther apart, then closer together, the time for light to reach the earth changed accordingly. His prediction was confirmed by the Académie's Royal Observatory in Paris. According to Roemer's calculations, published in the 1676 Journal des sçavans (and translated in the next year's Philosophical Transactions), the speed of light was such that it required roughly 22 minutes to travel the diameter of the earth's annual orbit. That equals approximately 215,000 kilometers per second, reasonably close to the actual value of 299,792.

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Map illustrating the past history of volcanic activity in France.

Up to the very early eighteenth century, the Journal des sçavans was the periodical that published the research activities of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. That changed in 1702, when the Académie Royale started the regular publication of its researches in its Histoire et Mémoires. The Histoire contained summaries of the Mémoires, which were selected full-length articles arranged in roughly chronological order and written by academy members. The Académie's Mémoires is widely viewed as the premier scientific journal in the eighteenth century.

First journals from other countries
The first scientific societies--part social club, part research institute, part publishing house--constitute the major institutional factor in shaping the scientific article at and just after its origin. These neophyte organizations had within their ranks most of the authors, readers, and editors of seventeenth-eighteenth century science in England and the Continent. They also created the social networks needed to establish what constituted good science and acceptable scientific prose.

The elegant Saggi di naturali esperienzi (Essays of natural experiments), written in Italian and published in 1667 by the short-lived Accademia del Cimento in Florence, is the first important record devoted exclusively to a scientific society's activities. This masterpiece of early bookmaking describes instruments and procedures and gives results for an eclectic collection of experiments performed by society members during 1657-1662. The Saggi was the only publication by this early scientific society and became the laboratory manual for physics experiments in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The two early journals from the German-speaking lands--Acta eruditorum (founded in 1682) and Miscellanea curiosa medico-physica (1670)--adopted Latin to reach the widest possible international audience. Among other important discoveries, the Acta published most of the articles in which Leibnitz announced and articulated his invention of the calculus. The Miscellanea, a product of the Collegium Naturae Curiosorum, was indeed a potpourri of curiosities. The 160 observations in the first year's volume include a remedy for an atrophy of the eye, a report on a serpent petrified in a stag's stomach, an account of a horny substance growing out of a man's rib cage, cures for deafness and headache, a way of "dwarfing men," and tales of men and women willing to eat strange things. By the mid-eighteenth century, most major cities and many provincial ones had their own scientific societies, each with its own acta, commentaries, journal, proceedings, transactions, miscellanea, or memoirs.

Image Gallery--Early Scientific Journals

Early scientific communication in America
Scientific societies and their publications took root in America even before the Declaration of Independence. The first American scientific society was the American Philosophical Society, started by Benjamin Franklin, among others, in Philadelphia in 1743 to pursue "all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things." After petering out for lack of interest after less than four years, the society was revived permanently in 1768. The first volume of its Transactions (1771) contains many articles reporting observations and measurements of the transit of Venus across the sun in 1769 and helped establish an international reputation not only for the American Philosophical Society, but American science in general. Thomas Jefferson served as the society's third president (1797-1815) and published a paleontological article on a sloth fossil in the fourth volume of its Transactions.

	Thinking Point
	Keep in mind the illustrations from Sessions 1 and 2 as you go through this seminar. Most of these images depict natural objects (a flea, flower, chameleon, etc.). What differences do you see in the images in the later sessions? What does this tell you about the changing nature of scientific inquiry?

The early American journals and scientific books are filled with new flora and fauna found throughout North America, and brought to life in both verbal descriptions and artistic engravings. John James Audubon's work on birds is the most widely known example. But many others, both native and foreign visitors, also contributed to the enormous enterprise of systematically documenting the splendors of the various species inhabiting the new world.

As in many early journals, the American publications mixed scientific observation with fabulous bits of hearsay. In the same volume where Jefferson's article, "A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia," appears is "A Letter from Mr. John Heckewelder to Benjamin Smith Barton, M.D. containing an Account of an Animal called the Big Naked Bear."

Other early American journals include Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1785), Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences (1817), and the American Journal of Science and Arts (1818).

The fact-gathering enterprise of early science
The scientific community of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had a large amateur constituency; these science enthusiasts were not especially concerned with concocting mathematical or mechanical explanations for their observational or experimental results. Many articles are simply undigested observations such as the sighting of comets or eclipses, descriptions of microscopic organisms and exotic flora and fauna, and accounts of medical oddities and other "strange facts." Suspicious of theorizing and speculation beyond the bare facts, many natural philosophers of that age saw themselves as participating in Francis Bacon's great unrealized dream of a museum containing a specimen of every scientific fact.

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Illustrations from Claude Perrault's "Anatomical description of three chameleons," published in 1700 by the French Académie Royale. The Académie began publishing Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux, a volume dedicated to zoological research, in 1671.

National Agricultural Library

Hibiscus from Curtis's Botanical Magazine.

One concrete manifestation of Bacon's dream was the fact-driven journal Curtis's Botanical Magazine (1787). Each issue of the magazine contains a series of vibrant watercolor depictions of plants rendered in lovingly exact detail. Until 1948, the magazine manufactured these artistic gems by mass-producing a line drawing by a professional artist or the author, then having groups of women and children hand color each illustration. Accompanying each illustration is a page or two of verbal description, including such technical details as the plant's habitat, color, scent, size, flower placement, and method of pollination.

Another manifestation of Bacon's dream was the monumental French encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, Encyclopédie: ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. The closeness of the full title to journal names of that time--such as Observations et mémoires sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts--attests to their kinship. And like Curtis's Botanical Magazine, the entries in the encyclopedia approached the subject matter in a systematic way regarding writing style, format, and content and also relied heavily upon visual representations, in this case nearly 3,000 copper-plate etchings.