The social basis and changing fortunes of an early scientific institution: an anlysis of the membership of the Royal Society, 1660-1685.

Abstract

Among seventeenth-century scientific groups, the Royal Society was remarkable for its formal organization and its large size. In contrast to the earlier, more casual scientific conclaves that preceded it in England, the Royal Society was a legally incorporated institution, established by Royal Charter, served by elected officers and with a fixed membership, proposed and elected, which was advertised annually on printed lists. On the other hand, as contemporaries noted, in contrast to the equally ‘established’ Académie des Sciences founded in Paris in 1666, which was served by a small group of scientific research-workers funded by the government, the Royal Society was an almost entirely amateur body, ‘a great assembly of Gentlemen', drawn from various occupational backgrounds. The membership totalled 131 m 1663, rising to 228 by 1669, and the large size and finite nature of the list of Fellows elected to the Society in its early years have assured it attention from historians in a statistically-minded age. In recent years more than one writer has used it in an attempt to illustrate by quantitative means ‘the psychological and sociological origins of modern science’.