The problems faced by the Council when it met to determine future strategy in the autumn of 1674 have already been discussed (Chapter 2). To summarise, it was finally determined (7 October)

with a forfeit of five pounds in case of failure, a heavy fine when a year's subscription amounted to only a shilling a week. In spite of the Council's firm resolution, nothing was placed upon the statutes, and the new proposals were minatory only, never binding. But, as will be seen, they worked fairly well for the next year or two and set the pattern for what became the most usual mode of ‘entertainment’ at meetings, that is, the reading of papers, while experiments performed at meetings became fewer.

The meetings in the autumn of 1674 began as intended. Wallis read ‘a discourse on gravity and gravitation grounded on experimental observations’; Boyle presented the Society with ‘Experimental Notes of the mechanical production of Fixedness … ’, which Oldenburg read for him (it was to be published the next year); Petty read his ‘Discourse concerning the Importance and Usefulness to Human Life of the Consideration of Duplicate and Subduplicate Proportion’ (a somewhat curious work, not really an experimental discourse); while, after the anniversary meeting, Hooke read ‘his discourse, concerning the construction and uses of his new quadrant’; Grew his ‘Discourse concerning the nature, causes and power of mixture’ on 10 December, when ‘several of the experiments mentioned in this discourse were exhibited after it was read’; and, a week later, Oldenburg read two ‘treatises’ by Ray on botany.

The roots of this study lie deep in the past: I have been interested in the history of the early Royal Society ever since, in 1951, I was generously allowed by the Society's then President, Council and Librarians to plunge into a study of the Boyle papers, the first to wish to do so, probably, since the mid-eighteenth century. This interest has grown with the years, especially when, some ten years later, my husband and I began to edit the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, named as one of the two Secretaries in the Charters of 1662 and 1663. In those days historical interest in the Royal Society centred mainly on the Society's origins, while currently it is rather on its institutional aspects and its sociological roots. Very little attention has been given, even now, to exactly what went on at its meetings, and especially what its Curators and Operators did in return for their salaries and what they contributed to its meetings, then its main activity. In the twentieth century, as in the seventeenth and eighteenth, many, perhaps most, Fellows value the Society principally for the honour which election to it confers, only a minority taking an active röle in its administrative affairs. But for those seventeenth-century Fellows who best exemplified the Society's aims, it was participation in the meetings which counted, and hence what went on at those meetings reveals much about their interests and those of the Society as a whole. For reasons which will become apparent below, I chose to concentrate upon one aspect of the Society's work, namely its concern with experiment.

With the inauguration of Newton's Presidency, much was to change within the Society and with the perception of it by outsiders. Most strikingly, it is for this period impossible to separate the office from the office-holder, the Royal Society from its President, and Newton the natural philosopher from Sir Isaac Newton P.R.S. The two rapidly became one in most eyes, so that the Society received the credit for Newton's fame and influence, while he in turn took on the attributes of the Royal Society.

Relations between the Society and individuals at home and abroad were also coloured by the fact of Newton's Presidency. Sloane remained an active Secretary for ten years, corresponding as before with, particularly, natural historians, medical men, and his French friends (he joined Newton as an associé etranger of the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1709); after that as a Vice-President he presided at meetings when Newton was not present and of course continued much of his correspondence and influence, although less publicly. In 1713 Halley became Secretary so that now official correspondence took on a more astronomical bent. The publication of Opticks and the growing number of adherents to the Newtonian natural philosophy meant an enormous growth in knowledge and understanding of the Royal Society's empirical programme, now ineluctably merged with the dominating figure of its President, even though the cult of Newtonianism associated with the Enlightenment lay still in the future. Learned visitors were eager to view the Royal Society and its President, one of the essential ‘sights’ of London.

The primary aim of the Royal Society has never been in doubt, for it was recorded in the minutes of the first, preliminary meeting on 28 November 1660. Then those gathered in the room of Lawrence Rooke (d. 1662), Gresham Professor of Astronomy, spoke of ‘a designe of founding a Colledge for the promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’, which it seemed might best be done by having ‘a more regular way of debating things, and according to the manner of other countries’ in order to ‘the promoting of experimentall philosophy’. The repeated emphasis upon experiment is the more worthy of notice because it was entirely original. By no means were all the foreign independent academies experimental in concept, while the Accademia del Cimento, which was, had been organised by, and worked directly under, private patronage and control. In contrast, the new English society was to be both experimental and independent, an organised continuation of private meetings that had taken place earlier, first in London in 1645 and later, then also in Oxford, now to be reformed with the addition of many who had returned with the King from exile on the Continent. The Royal Society was to be exceptional both in its attitude and in its procedures, while its emphasis upon experiment long remained its hallmark. As one of its first Secretaries, Henry Oldenburg, defined it in 1664, it was

As should be all too obvious by now, the Fellows' view of the Society to which they were proud to belong was of an organisation which flourished in proportion as its meetings were devoted to experiment and empiricism. This they saw as their primary aim, this they endeavoured to put into practice, this they tried to promulgate and publicise, it was to this that they turned when the Society appeared to languish and need reform. They were perhaps almost too successful. For the fluctuating reputation of the Royal Society over the first seven decades of its existence was very largely in proportion to the quality of such work as perceived by the public: as performed and discussed at meetings, as reported in the Philosophical Transactions, and as revealed in the publications of individual Fellows. The intellectual world on the whole agreed with the Fellows that empiricism lay at the heart of the Society's activities, although not all agreed on the value of such work.

It is difficult to find impartial observers, necessarily outside those more or less closely in touch with the Society, not least because, in spite of occasional proposals to the contrary, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Royal Society was never an exclusive body, numbers were not limited and so those who sympathetically praised the Society were generally elected forthwith, whether active natural philosophers, virtuosi, physicians, natural historians, antiquaries or noblemen. Intellectuals not so honoured were apt to view the Society with disfavour, no doubt a prime reason for their not being elected.

With Hooke's death there was to be a very considerable change in the Royal Society's activities. This was not quite the same situation as had arisen in 1677 when the death of a very active Secretary demanded as well as permitted change; it was rather that the death of Hooke, a former Secretary and more or less perpetual Curator of Experiments, de facto if not de jure, since 1662, made possible the installation of a new President (for Newton would never have accepted election while Hooke was alive), and this in turn led to the appointment of a new Curator of Experiments. Newton was to play an active part in the Society's affairs, presiding over the vast majority of meetings, commenting on, occasionally presenting experiments, and above all helping to guide the presentation of experiments, now far more numerous than had been the case in preceding decades, for the next fifteen years. After this, in Newton's extreme old age, the momentum generated previously then continued for another decade. The presence of a new Curator of Experiments (not always so called) totally revolutionised the Society's meetings. Francis Hauksbee, who suddenly appeared at the Society in December 1703 at the first meeting at which Newton presided, was to make the presentation of experiments once again an important feature of meetings from this time until shortly before his death in the spring of 1713.

It is obvious that the very existence of a Curator of Experiments is likely to generate the presentation of experiments at meetings, for Curators had to present experiments with some regularity to justify their existence (and salary).

It is helpful in considering the rôle of experiment to begin with the weekly activities of the Society as a whole, that is, by an analysis of the formal meetings. In this way it is possible to discern what ‘the promoting of experimentall philosophy’ meant to the majority of Fellows (especially those who did not write books at great length), and it is even possible to quantify the proportion of experiment to discussion to some extent. And experiment was certainly at the heart of the Society's original activities as it had been for its originators, those then young men who, as John Wallis remembered in old age, had since 1645 met with the same purpose and had even paid a subscription to cover the cost of experiment.

Before attempting to investigate the rôle of experiment at the weekly meetings in detail, it is well to consider the differing methods of presentation available for the promotion of experimental philosophy in the mid-seventeenth century. Sometimes a Fellow, who after the formalisation of the Society under the 1662 Charter was usually a Secretary, read letters describing experiments (although of course by no means all the letters read were concerned with experiment). Sometimes, and increasingly after 1674, Fellows read their own accounts of experiments performed elsewhere. Sometimes, and it is this which will be traced here, experiments were performed during the course of the meeting. In this latter case, it is commonly possible to know who performed the experiment in question, the Curator as it was called in the early days; he was usually assisted by the Operator, a paid employee.