Besides the performance and the description of experiments at meetings, there were other ways, both formal and informal, by which the Royal Society and its Fellows sought to promote the Society's experimental aims and ideals. There was the writing and publication of works wherein the Society's aims might be praised, exemplified, interpreted and urged as models to be followed, and this on many levels. There was the communication to those, at home and abroad, not able to attend meetings, of what was being done at those meetings, as likewise the solicitation of exchanges of discoveries, experiments, inventions and views from such absentee members. And there was the encouragement of the fruits of experimental learning by the sponsoring of publication, in many and various forms.

That the Fellows constantly tried to exemplify the aims and ideals of the Society in their writings is very well known but worth stressing again. Of all the earliest Fellows, none was so zealous or so successful in this regard as Robert Boyle, who, as a virtually unknown natural philosopher, blazed into fame in 1660 as the author of a most remarkably experimental treatise, New Experiments, Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects. It was topical, it was innovative and it was shot through and through with the author's profound belief in the value of experiment for discovery and, implicitly, for the testing of theory.

So run statutes of the Royal Society as passed in 1663 and so also those of 1939 and ever since. Moreover, in 1663 there was also a separate chapter of the statutes devoted to the making of, reporting on and financing of experiments. But the statutes of 1847, which were intended to embody new reforms which should render the Royal Society more strictly scientific than it had become in earlier decades, read, starkly,

These mid-nineteenth-century statutes in fact recognised a situation which had existed throughout much of the previous hundred years, a period during which both experiment and discussion were slowly abandoned and the character of the Royal Society's meetings altered, changing from an atmosphere of lively discussion and debate and the frequent display of experiment to one which was determinedly formal and lifeless.

So, paradoxically, the Royal Society no longer reflected the practice of contemporary science which was certainly devoted to experiment.

With Oldenburg's death, the Society was faced with a crisis in communication with which it was ill equipped to deal. In the autumn of 1677, although some letters continued to come in from abroad (naturally still addressed to Oldenburg), no one, not even Henshaw who was officially Secretary, seemed prepared to answer them, while the Philosophical Transactions (after all, Oldenburg's private business) came to an abrupt end. Nor was there immediately anyone prepared to take up such tasks as those of preparing Malpighi's works for publication. No future Secretary was ever to be quite so zealous as Oldenburg until Sloane became Secretary in 1693; he was very energetic, but busy though he was he did not have quite so many tasks in hand as Oldenburg, nor was he so skilled as Oldenburg in establishing a network of correspondence. Although the Society was to take such steps as it could to re-establish the tried methods of communication, it took time. Not everyone was at first convinced that foreigners and strangers ought to learn of the Society's affairs, and future Secretaries had to be both guided and goaded in their tasks.

The first concern of the Council was to recover the Society's books and papers which had been in Oldenburg's hands, a task complicated by the fact that Oldenburg had died intestate, as well as by Hooke's eager desire to peruse all papers relating to the controversy between Huygens and himself, which, he was certain, Oldenburg had managed to his, Hooke's, disadvantage. The second task was to regulate the Society's affairs in a period when the President, Brouncker, was ill, and the surviving Secretary, Henshaw, was acting as Vice-President in his place.