UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Small Mites for the Treasury of Learning: The Everyday Life of the New Science in Late Seventeenth-Century London A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Laura Ritchie Morgan 2016 © Copyright by Laura Ritchie Morgan 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Small Mites for the Treasury of Learning: The Everyday Life of the New Science in Late Seventeenth-Century London by Laura Ritchie Morgan Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Margaret C. Jacob, Chair Drawing on experimental notebooks, account books, estate inventories, and bureaucratic memoranda, this dissertation demonstrates that the investigation and manipulation of the natural world in Restoration London stretched beyond the well-known Royal Society. The Society relied on skills, labor, and unexpected expertise outside its Fellowship to shape its work, while skills valued by the Society’s Fellows were found in pre-existing industries. In addition, the experimentation, observation, and collection practices essential to the new science occurred in small shops, Royal palaces, and the streets of metropolis. Chapter Two argues that the Society’s first home at Gresham College was an uncontrolled space, neither public nor private, through which many Londoners moved. While some servants, craftspeople, and experts were invited in to contribute skill or labor, the experience and knowledge outsiders unexpectedly brought into the Society, the College, or London itself also influenced the questions investigated by the Society. ii Chapter Three is a detailed examination of apothecary John Conyers’s years-long efforts to disprove the theory of air pressure by observing changes in atmospheric moisture. Conyers’s commitment to the explanatory power of Galenic humoral theory and aspects of Aristotelian physics, while simultaneously embracing observation, experiment, and basic mechanism, demonstrate that the ideas of the new science were accepted in piecemeal amalgamation with older theories. Chapter Four reconstructs Conyers’s collections of curiosities, antiquities, and naturalia and argues that the formation of such small-scale collections involved people and locations across the social spectrum. In Restoration London, collecting objects of curiosity, antiquity, or natural history intersected seamlessly with existing local commercial routines and the chance discoveries unearthed in a city constantly under construction. Chapter Five examines the importance of practical natural knowledge for the Restoration Royal Mint. The production of dependable English coinage relied on mathematical, chymical, and technological skills, but the work of the Royal Mint did not attract attention from devotees of the new science. Chymically minded Fellows of the Royal Society simultaneously spoke of embracing learning from those with manual experience, and dismissed the skills practical metalworkers had to offer, obscuring the similarities between laboratories of the virtuosi and workshops at the Mint. iii The dissertation of Laura Ritchie Morgan is approved. Mary Terrall Lynn A. Hunt Deborah Harkness Margaret C. Jacob, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv In memory of Robert M. Ritchie. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Committee page iv Dedication v List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Vita x Chapter 1— 1 Introduction Chapter 2— 18 “Compounded of all sorts of men” (and a few women): The early Royal Society in Gresham College and Restoration London Chapter 3— 71 "Whether there be a Pressure in the Atmospheres or noe:" John Conyers's weather records and the apothecarial “profession” Chapter 4— 109 “A vast number of Curiosities:” Collecting in London c.1660-1700. Chapter 5— 153 “For the Coyning of the Monie:” Skills and Practices in the Restoration Royal Mint Conclusion 197 Appendix 1: preliminary catalog of Conyers’s collection 200 Bibliography 210 vi List of Figures: Figure 2.1: Gresham College in London, 1676. 28 Figure 2.2: Gresham College. 32 Figure 2.3: A diving bell. 64 Figure 4.1: John Conyers’s London. 133 Figure 4.2: William Courten’s London. 148 vii Acknowledgements First thanks are due to my committee members: As my committee chair and advisor, Margaret Jacob has guided me by providing encouragement, patience, travel funds, and thoughtful feedback; in addition, I can’t thank her enough for a truly life changing conversation about work-life balance after my second year at UCLA. Mary Terrall read each of my chapter drafts with care and thoughtful attention, providing invaluable comments and suggestions along the way. I also thank Lynn Hunt and Deborah Harkness for their advice and feedback. A draft of Chapter 3 was presented at the UCLA History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Colloquium in 2013. My thanks to all who came and provided feedback, especially Robert Frank and Amir Alexander. A section of Chapter 4 was presented in a slightly different form at the UC Berkeley Graduate Student Conference “Fields of Inquiry” in March 2014. Thank you to all the participants and Carla Yanni for feedback. In addition, Melissa Lo’s astute conversation and deep knowledge of early modernity helped me to sort out many a dissertation conundrum. Many thanks are also due to the graduate students who joined me in a dissertation- writing group in the 2014-2015 academic year. I would still be writing if not for the structure, feedback, and camaraderie provided by Kate Craig, Rebecca Dufendach, Alma Heckman, Jason Lustig, and Kathryn Renton. Along the way I have learned from too many other UCLA History Department faculty members and graduate students to name. Thanks also to the Department staff, especially the incomparable Hadley Porter who has done so much to ease the inherently stressful nature of graduate studies. In the archives I accumulated debts to the staff, librarians, and archivists at the British Library, The National Archives (Kew), The London Metropolitan Archives, The Royal Society, viii The Wellcome Collection, and the Mercer’s Company Archive. Particular thanks to LMA staff, who possessed infinite patience and good humor as they searched through many boxes of rolled inventories to find the ones I was interested in. The library staff at Charles Young Research Library at UCLA and at the Bibliotheque National de France in Paris made it easy to find any secondary source I could imagine, even far away from the British Isles. I was fortunate to be surrounded by a love of reading, learning, and writing from birth. To every teacher who encouraged my love of reading and writing and erudition along the way, and to all the family and friends who have supported me from afar, I send my thanks. Especially important has been my mother, Carolyn, who not only imparted her love of the written word to me, but who also enjoyed reading even some less-than-coherent dissertation drafts. My sister Ruth Ann has inspired me through her own accomplishments and, in her love of travel, reminded me of the importance of looking around outside the archives from time to time. Karola Kirsanow’s conversation, companionship, and encouragement across many years and many countries have been invaluable. Most importantly, my husband, Stuart, has supported my dissertation in every way imaginable. He’s known when to free me from distractions and when to encourage me to take a break. He’s endured long separations, read drafts, listened to monologues about the 17th century, made cocktails, and offered friendly reminders about the power of outlines. Above all, the constancy of his support, his belief in me, and his willingness to do whatever needed to be done so that I could finish this dissertation has helped buoy me up in times of doubt, enabling me to reach the end. I couldn’t have had a better partner on this journey. ix VITA 2003 B.A., History and Philosophy of Science, magna cum laude Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 2009-2011 Teaching Assistant UCLA Department of History 2011 M.A., History C.Phil., History University of California, Los Angeles Presentations: “‘Very Considerable and Odd’: The Weather Records of John Conyers and the Apothecarial Profession.” UCLA History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Colloquium. October 28, 2013. “In the Shop, House, and Street: John Conyers’s Pursuit of the New Science in Restoration London,” Fields of Inquiry: Science Crossing Scales, Epistemologies, and Environments. UC Berkeley, March 8, 2014. x Chapter 1 Introduction When London apothecary John Conyers began composing a treatise on magnetism in the 1670s, he acknowledged that he was approaching a “difficult” topic on which others were far more expert. Nevertheless, he wrote that he had something new to contribute, and so dared to “offer my small mite into the Treasury of the Learning of this kind.”1 Such expressions of authorial modesty were common tropes amongst Restoration authors, including those writing on the new experimental natural philosophy, a literature with which Conyers was undoubtedly familiar. Conyers’s phrase, however, also suggested that he believed he was one of many contributors to a cooperative compilation of valuable new knowledge, and that his personal observations of magnetic phenomena would add, in a small but significant way, to a growing collection of information about the workings of the natural world. Language about the collaborative study of nature was widespread in the elite circles around the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660 to “promot[e] by the authority of experiments the sciences of natural things and of useful arts.”2 The Society’s apologist Thomas Sprat employed this language in his 1667 The History of the Royal Society, extolling the virtues of a collective approach to studying nature. Embracing Francis Bacon’s idea of a cooperative investigation of nature, Sprat claimed that the study of nature would benefit from employing many hands. By removing the study of the natural world and useful arts from the control of university-based Aristotelian philosophers, the Royal Society, argued Sprat, would make great 1 John Conyers.