Newly discovered Boyle documents in the Royal Society archive: alchemical tracts and his student notebook

Abstract

The life, works and influence of Robert Boyle (1627-1691) have been receiving greatly increased attention of late. Boyle scholars continue to enrich our image of Boyle by filling out his career in terms of his roles not only as a natural philosopher, theologian, and founding member of the Royal Society, but also as a rhetorician, moralist, and alchemist. Historical evidence for Boyle’s presently less well-known activities has been provided by examining his published writings in a more comprehensive and less programmatic way, and by scrutinizing the mass of surviving manuscript material (in excess of 14 000 pages) preserved in the Royal Society archives and at the British Library, where there are a few items among Thomas Birch’s manuscripts. In spite of the great volume of these surviving papers, there is a large amount of significant manuscript material known to have existed which is not now extant in the archive. For example, Boyle wrote a Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals which appears repeatedly in inventory lists drawn up towards the end of his life. At present, however, all that survives are rough first or second drafts and a fragment of a Latin translation. Had such a work survived in its entirety, Boyle’s role in early modem chemistry might now be portrayed quite differently, for even the fragmentary existing text displays Boyle’s largely suppressed or ignored alchemical interests and beliefs. (The surviving text, edited and annotated by the present author, will be published shortly.) This Dialogue , however, is far from being the only potentially instructive text now missing. About a hundred other texts are missing, comprising a diverse array of topics from a conjectural discourse ‘On the Fuel of the Solar Fire’ to an ‘Apology for Romances’. In an effort to find some of these manuscripts I recently undertook a renewed search of the Royal Society archives and located another seven items related to Boyle, two of which have special importance.