John Beaumont: Science, Spirits and the Scale of Nature

Abstract

In May 1685, John Beaumont, of Ston Easton in the Mendips region of Somerset, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He had already published several papers in the society’s Philosophical Transactions and Philosophical Collections and was a friend of leading Royal Society members such as Robert Hooke and Edward Tyson. His close observations of the geology of the Mendip hills and mines, and the specimens he collected from such studies, brought him praise from the new generation of natural historians such as Robert Plot and John Ray, and both the Royal Society and the Oxford Philosophical Society were keen to see him publish the natural history of Somerset, for which he issued proposals earlier in 1685. Although this history never materialised, there was praise for his most substantial work of geology, his 1693 Considerations on Dr Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, which offered a sustained critique of Burnet’s Cartesian account of the current earth as the ruins of a former perfect globe, of his account of how the deluge had produced such catastrophic change, and of his view of the future fiery destruction of the world. Beaumont used his own observational data, as well as arguments from biblical and classical scholarship and other natural histories, to argue for the evidence of design in the world as currently formed. Hence Beaumont earns his place in Roy Porter’s account of the earth sciences in this period as one of the best field workers, with a significant collection of fossils and stones, and as an effective theorist of the earth in the natural history (and natural design) tradition.1