The record of the Royal Society of London.

  • Royal Society (Great Britain)
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The record of the Royal Society of London. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    58/540 (page 38)
    appointed to put order in the Society’s collection of ‘ natural rarities But besides receiving the various objects that were presented to it, the Society at one time employed an emissary to travel over the country for the purpose of collecting other specimens, more particularly in natural history.* Thus in the Journal-book under date October 21, 1669, it is recorded that ‘ Thomas Willisell the botanick Traveller, entertained by the Society, brought in his collection of plants gathered in several parts of England and Scotland, together with some rare Scottish fowl and fish It is added that Dr. Merret ‘ digested these plants ’, and Mr. Hooke was instructed to ‘ take the whole collection into his custody, for the Repository, making first an Inventory of them and producing that before the Society In less than twenty years the Repository had increased so much that a folio volume of nearly 500 pages was published as a cata- logue and description of its contents. The title-page of this book runs as follows : ‘ Musaeum Regalis Societatis or a Catalogue and Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham Colledge : made by Nehemiah Grew M.D. Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Colledge of Physitians : London, Printed by W. Rawlins for the Author 1681.’ The objects are there arranged methodically, beginning wdth ‘ Humane Rarities ’ and descending through the various grades of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to the different kinds of stones and metals. It presents an interesting compendium from which the state of knowledge in regard to natural history at that time may be inferred. Within the range of the biological inquiries contemplated by every day given in, not only by the hands of learned and professed philosophers ; hut from the shops of mechanics, from the voyages of merchants, from the ploughs of husbandmen, from the sports, the fish-ponds, the parks, the gardens of gentlemen.’ Hist. Roy. Soc., 1667, p- 71. In 1779 when the Society was about to remove to Somerset House the con- tents of the Repository were handed over to the British Museum. ^ Evelyn, Diary, April 1, 1666. ^ Thomas Willisell, the emissary thus employed, was furnished with a commission hearing the Society’s seal and recommending him ‘ to all generous and ingenuous spirits ’ for their assistance ‘ in promoting a work so generally beneficial to all mankind ’. ^ Evelyn’s entry of the same date is as follows : ‘ Our English Itinerant presented an account of his autumnal peregrination about England, for which we hired him, bringing dried fowls, fish, plants, animals, &c.’