The Salt of the Earth

Roos, Anna Marie

doi:10.1163/ej.9789004161764.i-296

Cited by 32 publications

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“…56 As for Susanna, we see that by 1685 (if not before, because this was a draft book for the 1685 publication) she was certainly engraving. 57 The draft book for De Cochleis shows her engraved figure of a nautilus shell, plate 556, signed 'Susan', which also appeared in the A. M. Roos …”

Section: Art Of Sciencementioning

confidence: 93%

The Art of science: a ‘Rediscovery’ of the Lister Copperplates

Roos

2011

Notes Rec. R. Soc.

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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. I use historical analysis, as well as a selective study of the copperplates with X-ray fluorescence techniques, to examine a portion of the plates and the process of their production. I show that Martin Lister's daughter engraved a paper for Philosophical Transactions , and demonstrate that she was among the first female scientific illustrators to use a microscope. Furthermore, one of the Lister copperplates may be the last survivor of those engraved for Philosophical Transactions , the rest having been surrendered to the nation in World War I. The significant intellectual and artisanal challenges presented to a skilful naturalist in the transformation of a field specimen into an aesthetically pleasing illustration as well as a scientific object conveying taxonomic information are delineated.

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Section: Art Of Sciencementioning

confidence: 93%

The Art of science: a ‘Rediscovery’ of the Lister Copperplates

Roos

2011

Notes Rec. R. Soc.

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“…9 Circumstantial evidence suggests that Lister was the translator. 10 In 1685 Boyle published his Short Memoirs for the Natural Experimental History of Mineral Waters. His account was the last instalment in this wave of interest.…”

Section: Mineral Waters Across the Channelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mineral waters across the Channel: matter theory and natural history from Samuel Duclos's minerallogenesis to Martin Lister's chymical magnetism, ca . 1666–86

Roos

Boantza

2015

Notes Rec.

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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. We examine Observations with a focus on the changing attitudes towards chymical knowledge and practice in the French Academy and the Royal Society of London in the period 1666–84. Chymistry was a fundamental analytical tool for seventeenth-century natural historians, and, as the work of Lawrence Principe and William Newman has shown, it is central to understanding the ‘long’ Scientific Revolution. Much study has also been done on the developing norms of openness in the dissemination and presentation of scientific, and particularly chymical knowledge in the late seventeenth century, norms that were at odds with traditions of secrecy among individual chymists. Between these two standards a tension arose, evidenced by early modern ‘vociferous criticisms’ of chymical obscurity, with different strategies developed by individual philosophers for negotiating the emergent boundaries between secrecy and openness. Less well studied, however, are the strategies by which not just individuals but also scientific institutions negotiated these boundaries, particularly in the formative years of their public and political reputation in the late seventeenth century. Michael Hunter's recent and welcome study of the ‘decline of magic’ at the Royal Society has to some extent remedied these omissions. Hunter argues that the Society—as a corporate body—disregarded and avoided studies of magical and alchemical subjects in the late seventeenth century. Our examination problematizes these distinctions and presents a more complex picture.

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“…113 As Anna Marie Roos points out, Hales' work on distillation was in the tradition of Nehemiah Grew, premised on the centrality of salt in his chemical vocabulary. 114 Hales commented in both Philosophical Experiments and Account, defending the infamous Mrs Stephen's patent medicine for urinary calculi, that fire gave acid sulphur salts "polarity" or a corrosive power in the same manner "a Loadstone makes Filings of Iron erect themselves into brittle-little Spires," a chemical transformation that also described the composition of harmful calculi and spirituous liquor. 115 As he recognised in the double potential of distilling, Hales recognised that the "polarity" or forces of attraction that created urinary calculi were the same forces of attraction that could be used to destroy them.…”

Section: Hales and Double Distillationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Who is the Almighty that We should serve Him?” Chaos, Providence and Natural Philosophy in Stephen Hales

Baxfield

2013

Ambix

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This article argues that the chemical and physiological experiments undertaken by the natural philosopher Stephen Hales (1677-1761) constituted a reformulation of providential matter theory. Hales was responding to a continuing debate about the position of chaos in the natural world between Newtonians like Samuel Clarke, who posited chaos as oppositional to immediate providential direction, and those such as John Ray and Bernard Nieuwentyt, who argued that nature was a chaos of operations, organised by divinely endowed but innate principles. Vegetable Staticks (1727) represents an attempted solution, arguing that a chaos of operations could support life only if it was concurrent with God's direction. Subsequently criticised by the Irish theologian Peter Browne for indulging frivolity, Hales responded in Haemastatics (1733) by auditing how spirituous liquor precipitated a bodily disintegration from the chaos of operations into a destructive chaos. Hales' subsequent campaign against spirits should be read as an extension of his experimental philosophy as a moral tool.Hales had surmised that the leaves "perform in some measure that same office for the support of vegetable life that the lungs of animals do, for the support of animal life." 2 Darwin published a short reply in 1915, maintaining that Hales conflated nutrition and respiration because his view of plant nutrition reflected Isaac Newton's Opticks Query 30, where both respiration and digestion were processes of fermentation. 3 Nonetheless, Gibson maintained that Hales had built on the "foundations of vegetable anatomy" laid down by Nehemiah Grew and used experiment to establish separate and "definite notions as to the part leaves play in plant nutrition. Transpiration is of course their chief function." 4 This disagreement over Hales' accomplishments reflected their divergence over the science that Hales practised. Invoking William Whewell's distinction between "The Why? Of the Physicist [meaning] through what causes?" and "that of the Physiologist -To what end?" Francis Darwin claimed Hales as "chemist and physicist" who was less interested in the exact function of organs than in the underlying fundamental principles of life. In contrast, Gibson heralded Hales as "the founder of experimental physiology of plants" who applied concretely the fundamental principles developed by his predecessor Grew. 5 While historians of science now recognise these labels and divisions as anachronistic in the early modern period, Anna Marie Roos has recently revisited the question of how Hales asked "The Why" and "To what end" and suggests, provokingly, that he was a chymist, part of a tradition that included Robert Boyle and Grew "which attempted to identify the vital principles in the air responsible for respiration with a particular reactive chymical substance." 6 While Roos agrees with Francis Darwin's emphasis on the Newtonian nature of Hales' air, she suggests also the centrality of salt, a "primeval principle or fundamental mover," in Hales' understanding of material ...

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The Salt of the Earth

Cited by 32 publications

References 0 publications

The Art of science: a ‘Rediscovery’ of the Lister Copperplates

The Art of science: a ‘Rediscovery’ of the Lister Copperplates

Mineral waters across the Channel: matter theory and natural history from Samuel Duclos's minerallogenesis to Martin Lister's chymical magnetism, ca . 1666–86

“Who is the Almighty that We should serve Him?” Chaos, Providence and Natural Philosophy in Stephen Hales

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