Taking Newton on tour: the scientific travels of Martin Folkes, 1733-1735.

Martin Folkes (1690-1754) was Newton's protégé, an English antiquary, mathematician, numismatist and astronomer who would in the latter part of his career become simultaneously president of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. Folkes took a Grand Tour from March 1733 to September 1735, recording the Italian leg of his journey from Padua to Rome in his journal. This paper examines Folkes's travel diary to analyse his Freemasonry, his intellectual development as a Newtonian and his scientific peregrination.

The Saline Chymistry of Color in Seventeenth Century English Natural History.

Before Newton's seminal work on the spectrum, seventeenth-century English natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Nehemliah Grew and Robert Plot attributed the phenomenon of color in the natural world to salts and saline chymistry. They rejected Aristotelian ideas that color was related to the object's hot and cold qualities, positing instead that saline principles governed color and color changes in flora, fauna and minerals. In our study, we also characterize to what extent chymistry was a basic analytical tool for seventeenth-century English natural historians.

MINERAL WATERS ACROSS THE CHANNEL: MATTER THEORY AND NATURAL HISTORY FROM SAMUEL DUCLOS'S MINERALLOGENESIS TO MARTIN LISTER'S CHYMICAL MAGNETISM, CA. 1666-86.

Our essay analyses a little-known book, Observations sur les eaux minerales des plusieurs provinces de France (1675), which is a study of French mineral waters, commissioned by and conducted at the French Royal Academy of Science (est. 1666). Its author, Samuel Cottereau Duclos (1598-1685), was a senior founding figure of the Academy, its chief chymist and one of its most influential members.

The Chymistry of "The Learned Dr Plot" (1640-96).

In the seventeenth century, there were developing norms of openness in the presentation of scientific knowledge that were at odds with traditions of secrecy among chymists, particularly practitioners of chrysopoeia, or the transmutation of metals. This chapter analyzes how Dr. Robert Plot, the first professor of chymistry at Oxford, negotiated these boundaries within an institutional context.

The art of science: a 'rediscovery' of the Lister copperplates.

In 1712 Martin Lister bequeathed the collection of more than 1000 copperplates to the University of Oxford that he used for his Historiae Conchyliorum, the first comprehensive study of conchology. In the mid-eighteenth century, William Huddesford, keeper of the Bodleian Library, used the copperplates to create another edition of Historiae, but after that they are not mentioned again in the published literature. I recently 'rediscovered' the plates in the Bodleian Library, since their transfer from the Ashmolean Museum in 1860.

'Magic coins' and 'magic squares': the discovery of astrological sigils in the Oldenburg Letters.

Enclosed in a 1673 letter to Henry Oldenburg were two drawings of a series of astrological sigils, coins and amulets from the collection of Strasbourg mathematician Julius Reichelt (1637-1719). As portrayals of particular medieval and early modern sigils are relatively rare, this paper will analyse the role of these medals in medieval and early modern medicine, the logic behind their perceived efficacy, and their significance in early modern astrological and cabalistic practice. I shall also demonstrate their change in status in the late seventeenth century from potent magical healing amulets tied to the mysteries of the heavens to objects kept in a cabinet for curiosos.

All that glitters: fool's gold in the early-modern era.

Natural philosophers of the early-modern period perceived fool's gold or iron pyrites as a substance required for the formation of metals, and chemists such as Johann Glauber speculated the vitriol produced from pyrites was the source of the legendary philosopher's stone. The sulphurous exhalations of fool's gold were also thought by members of the early Royal Society to be the basis of a variety of meteorological, geological and medical effects, including the production of thunder, lightning, earthquakes and volcanoes, fossilisation and petrifaction, as well as the principal cause of bladder and gallstones.

Martin Lister (1639-1712) and fools' gold.

Seventeenth-century physician Martin Lister is best known for his work in natural history and participation in the early Royal Society. However, little attention has been focused upon Lister's work in chemistry, the most salient examples being his analysis of pyrites or "fools' gold" near mineral springs in the De Fonbibus medicatis Angliae Exercitatio of 1684 (Exercises on the healing springs of England), his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions in the 1670s and 1680s, and his unpublished manuscript " A Method for the History of Iron, Imperfect." He defined pyrites more specifically as " ironstone marcasites" which were "nothing else but a body of iron disguised under a vitriolic varnish"; "vitriol" referred to iron (II) sulfate which occurred as a weathering product of pyrites.