Early problems in professionalizing scientific research: Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) and the Royal Society with an unpublished letter to Henry Oldenburg.

Abstract

Nehemiah Grew’s The Anatomy of Plants (1682) was one of the most important botanical books published in the seventeenth century. In this compendium of his research, Grew combined an unprecedentedly detailed study of the structure of plants with an attempt to understand their functions. Working independently of, but in parallel with, his Italian contemporary, Marcello Malpighi, Grew justifiably saw himself as a pioneer in a new field, and between them these two scientists revolutionized biological knowledge. Grew ’s outstanding work has attracted various appraisals, the most detailed of them appearing in the pages of this journal, but no full scrutiny has ever been made of the role of the Royal Society in assisting these investigations. Not only did the Society arrange for the publication of Malpighi’s Anatome Plantarum in two parts in London in 1675 and 1679, in itself a tribute to the Society’s role in European science. In the case of Grew, its influence was even greater, for a decisive stimulus to the completion and publication of his work was provided by the Society’s offer of a research post to him in 1672, and by its continued support thereafter: Grew himself claimed that without the Society’s encouragement in the project, he ‘would scarcely have ventured upon it’. Indeed the 1672 episode has a wider significance, as one of the earliest cases of a scientific institution sponsoring a specific research project. The Royal Society had by then employed Robert Hooke for nearly a decade, during which he had published research of great importance: but the capacity in which he had been retained by the Society had been more that of a demonstrator, and other employees had been clerical or more menial in function. In France, of course, the state support provided when the Academie des Sciences was founded in 1666 assured a number of salaries for scientists: but the voluntary nature of the Royal Society imposed financial constraints which made such patronage far harder to organize.