Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

Other scientific societies did not trace their inspiration so directly to Bacon. Galileo wielded enormous influence over scientific developments in Italy, and he was a member of Rome’s Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1603. Like Rome, many Italian cities housed learned societies, more properly Renaissance academies that promoted a range of subjects: Bologna claimed an Accademia degli Affidati (1548) and Naples an Accademia Secretorum Naturae (ca. 1560) and later an Accademia degli Investiganti (ca. 1650). Unlike other Renaissance academies, however, those in Bologna and Naples concerned themselves with the cultivation of natural knowledge, rather than literature or the arts.

The foremost among the Italian academies was the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiments), founded in 1657. The small society of nine members – including the important naturalists Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1674) and Francesco Redi (1626–ca.1698) – depended on the patronage of Prince Leopold de’Medici and answered to his whims. It assembled a fine collection of scientific instruments to effect its sole purpose: conducting experiments. Members tested the theoretical work of Galileo and his disciples and recorded the results anonymously in the Academy’s Saggi di naturali experienze. Despite the group’s pronounced commitment to empiricism and their rejection of all speculative theorizing, Academy members fell victim to the conservative backlash of the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation. It also suffered through the centrifugal force of members’ personal quarrels, resulting in disbandment for ten years until they settled their differences.

Even seventeenth-century Germany, in its state of political fragmentation and economic torpor, could claim scientific societies. In Altdorf, a Collegium Curiosum sive Experimentale was created in 1672 with twenty members, after the model of the Accademia del Cimento. Some twenty years earlier, an Academia Naturae Curiosorum had been founded, whose principal function was to publish an annual volume of contributions by its physician members, the Miscellanea Curiosorum. But it was only with the creation of the Berlin Academy in 1700, at the urging of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, that Germany could claim a society along the lines of the Royal Society or France’s Académie des Sciences. The society was to be funded by the proceeds from the monopoly on printing calendars owned by the elector (the future Prussian king, Frederick I). Part of the Berlin Academy’s programme involved the advancement of German technology and nationalism, giving particular attention to improving the German language. Leibniz’s activism also led to the creation of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1724.8

In France, academies could be found in provincial towns like Caen, Rouen, and Montpellier. These included not only learned societies as such, but also other kinds of educational institution, including schools of manly exercise, classical languages, and oratory. The capital city (as in England) dominated scientific life at this time. One of the earliest informal circles in Paris – dating back to the 1630s – was organized by the Minim monk Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), himself devoted to the physical sciences. Mersenne, who had studied mathematics with Descartes, translated some of the writings of Galileo into French and popularized the work of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). After Mersenne’s death in 1648, a successor to his academy was organized by nobleman Habert de Montmor (ca.1600–1679), which adopted a formal constitution in 1657. Weekly meetings took place in Montmor’s house; mathematician and cleric Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) presided over them. But the Montmor Academy became as much a social club for the highest levels of Parisian society as a forum for disseminating the new science.

It was through the Montmor Academy that the Royal Society began to influence the future shape of science in France. Members of the two organizations were linked by correspondence and personal visits; some individuals, like the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, belonged to both. The French admired the new spirit of critical enquiry exemplified by the English cultivation of empiricism and experiment. It remained unclear, however, how the English model of cooperation among men of different social backgrounds, political persuasions, and religious convictions might be applied in the French milieu. Personal rivalries – fuelled by competing philosophical doctrines like Cartesianism and experimentalism – helped to spell the collapse of Montmor Academy by 1665. The instability brought about by its indifferent financial support strengthened pleas by Melchisédech Thévenot (ca.1620–1692), Adrien Auzout (1622–1691) and Pierre Petit (ca.1594–1677) for the creation of a subsidized society for experimentation.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XIV, responded sympathetically to the advances of the former Montmorans. He adapted the plans put forward by Thévenot and his friends, in the end calling for fifteen salaried academicians, hand-picked from among the most distinguished scientific names of Europe. The positions were divided between two categories or classes: ‘mathematicians’ (also including astronomers) and ‘natural philosophers’, made up of chemists, physicists, and anatomists. (The decision to emphasize the physical sciences resulted from Colbert’s concern to minimize conflict with other established bodies, such as the Faculty of Medicine in Paris.) In contrast to the Royal Society, members were expected to specialize in a particular area of study. Their first meeting was convened in the Royal Library in 1666. Subsequently, meetings were held twice a week: mathematicians met on Wednesdays; natural philosophers on Saturdays.

There were strings attached to this act of royal munificence, especially on the part of the mercantilist Colbert. The Académie des Sciences joined the Académie Française in the Sun King’s intellectual firmament; at the very least, it was intended to proclaim, affirm, and reflect his glory. Academicians, in addition, were expected to deliver on the experimentalists’ utilitarian promises, which linked scientific investigations with advancement in industry, trade, and military prowess.

As a result of being given a clear mandate from the government, the early Académie des Sciences appeared to embrace the Baconian programme of cooperative research in at least two concrete ways that the Royal Society did not. The establishment of the Observatoire de Paris in 1699 allowed Academicians to carry out a continuous programme of observing the heavens and mounting scientific expeditions, with these undertakings ultimately leading to the solution of navigational and astronomical problems. The Académie also required its members to cooperate on a regular basis in order to adjudicate the merit of technical processes and to bestow patents on worthy inventions. The practice of the early Académie des Sciences suggests that cooperative efforts were more effectively applied to evaluating new ideas than to creating them.

The workings of the early Académie des Sciences remain somewhat obscure, at least until a total overhaul occurred in 1699. Before this date, the Académie had possessed neither rules nor constitution. Colbert himself had selected the first academicians, foreign as well as French, the most distinguished being the Dutch natural philosopher Huygens. Later appointees to the working membership of fifteen pensionaries – rigidly divided according to scientific speciality (geometry, astronomy, mechanics, anatomy, or chemistry) – included the astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) and the polymath Leibniz. The Académie possessed, in addition, ten honorary positions. Somewhat surprisingly, Cartesians were excluded in this, the home of Descartes; activists like Auzout and Thévenot were marginalized. At this early stage in its history, the Académie des Sciences functioned under Baconian inspiration, with a small membership undertaking joint experimental investigations on a range of topics. It was an elitist association, limited in size with an exclusive admissions policy.9

To some extent the early Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences may be seen as typifying the English and French scientific traditions. The Royal Society grew out of individual initiative and received royal recognition only after the fact. From its inception, it drew heavily upon the landed gentry for its membership and treasury; as a result, the breadth of its interests wandered away from the narrowly scientific. The Académie des Sciences, by contrast, functioned more as a branch of the French civil service, with a high degree of regimentation and control exercised from above. It remains difficult to assess the relative merits of the two scientific systems: the French, with its strong stamp of centralization and control, versus the English tradition, which cultivated individual self-reliance, perhaps as a direct result of the lack of state support. Whatever the advantages of either system, we see here the first crystallization of national differences in scientific traditions. The rise of nation states in the nineteenth century enhanced these distinctions.

Science flourished in Britain during the last half of the seventeenth century, despite the collapse of earlier humanitarian projects and the cynicism displayed by the king. Any decline in membership in the Royal Society was more than counterbalanced by the rise of new provincial centres of scientific activity, for example, in the creation of philosophical societies at Dublin and Oxford, both founded in 1683. As Michael Hunter has explained, seventeenth century English society showed a penchant for establishing public bodies, as opposed to impermanent, highly mutable structures dependent on personal whim.

France, on the other hand, failed to emerge as a centre of scientific excellence, despite the elaborate designs of enlightened despotism which had brought the full support of the state to a host of scientific projects. By the late seventeenth century, these programmes fell afoul of political and economic contingencies. The increasingly extravagant ambitions of Louis XIV, ushering in an era of prolonged warfare with England, meant a decline in financial support for science. A period of domestic intolerance, inaugurated with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, further contracted opportunities for the free exchange of scientific ideas, and Protestant intellectuals like Henri Justel (1620–1693) were marginalized.

The rise of the scientific correspondent

The creation and persistence of the new institutions attests the strength of the scientific movement. An additional ‘barometer of intellectual health’, in the words of Harcourt Brown, was the ‘exchange of news, books, and journals’ among these organizations, particularly through official or unofficial representatives. Operating from the Place Royale in Paris, for example, Mersenne circulated information to an informal network of French natural philosophers, including Descartes, Gassendi, Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665), Gilles de Roberval (1602–1675) and Blaise Pascal. Mersenne constructed an unprecedented system of scientific communication, with nearly eighty participants. An even more elaborate correspondence network was established by the Royal Society’s Henry Oldenburg, who as secretary from 1662 until his death in 1677, exchanged information with Mersenne and Henri Justel, secretary to Louis XIV. Modern science began as an international undertaking.

Justel disseminated English scientific news and books across continental Europe. For nearly thirty years, until his death in 1693, he was Henry Oldenburg’s most important link with Europe; he lent incalculable assistance to advancing the Royal Society’s reputation. Justel channelled information through a circle of intimate acquaintances who attended his ‘conferences’ in Paris, as well as through a more widely ranging network of contacts with the leading intellectuals of Europe. French members of his circle included Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), founder of the Caen Académie des Sciences and the Abbé Charles, one of the editors of the Journal des sçavans. Despite Justel’s illustrious collaborators, his correspondence has been seen as valuable not for its coherent exposition of a particular point of view, but for ‘the mass of dissociated facts and opinions … conveyed’.10 Even a cursory examination of the letters exchanged between Oldenburg and Justel reveals how much useful scientific information could be gleaned from what appears to be, on the surface, just delightfully candid gossip.

Intelligencers like Justel and Oldenburg depended upon travellers and diplomats to transmit their parcels and letters. A network of courtiers, statesmen, and civil servants scattered across the Continent, the Near East, and the New World provided Oldenburg with the machinery for collecting information and gaining new foreign agents. Oldenburg’s contacts, who introduced him to local virtuosi, sent summaries of new books, reports of experiments, and simple accounts of everyday scientific activity. Formal relations between the Royal Society and foreign academies were merely polite and sterile; virtually all news of Continental science went to Oldenburg from Justel or from Englishmen abroad.

The importance of these connections suggests that the rise of scientific societies has depended on the emergence of the apparatus of the modern state. Departing from traditional Marxist arguments by which science is driven by economic need, the demands of capitalism failed to dictate a set of problems to seventeenth-century researchers. Rather, the expansion of trade and commerce associated with the rise of capitalism provided a means of collecting and amassing valuable information. Groups in one geographical location could be brought into communication with like-minded individuals elsewhere. Essentially, seventeenth-century mercantile developments nurtured and sustained the evolution of learned societies.

Eighteenth-century expansion

A century after the creation of the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences there were around two hundred societies devoted to science or technology. In France alone, twenty-five provincial academies appeared by the eve of the French Revolution. Generally speaking, these societies stimulated research and provided for the diffusion of that research through their publications. The appellation of ‘literary society’ – characteristic of eighteenth-century societies – refers less to their cultivation of belles lettres than to their concern with scientific literature.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, learned societies emerged, as James McClellan puts it, as ‘the characteristic form for the organization of culture’ throughout the Western world and its spheres of influence. A host of subsets of these societies might be discussed, but for our purpose those exclusively or even partially devoted to science (along with literary studies or technology) are the most interesting. Their exponentially increasing number outdistanced other institutional forms of scientific activity, whether botanical gardens, observatories, or universities. No leading scientist was without an affiliation to one of them. Not only did they sponsor publications, but they endowed prizes and funded expeditions. McClellan understands the flourishing of scientific academies during the last half of the eighteenth century as ‘an unprecedented development in the organizational and institutional history of science’. As he demonstrates, by the end of the eighteenth century, scientific societies extended ‘from Philadelphia and Kentucky in the west to Saint Petersburg (or arguably Batavia, the East Indies) in the east, and from Trondheim (Norway) in the north to Sicily and Haiti in the south’.

The establishment of learned societies during the eighteenth century became an international movement, reaching its peak in the 1780s. These institutions were concentrated in European urban centres, particularly in France. Few nations failed to support scientific societies; only the European capital cities of Spain and Austria were without them. They were – alongside churches, courts of law, and universities – manifestations of high culture, with all its implications of exclusiveness. Only during the next century would this fundamental characteristic of scientific societies be altered; no longer would they be the exclusive prerogative of a learned and powerful elite.

Eighteenth-century developments may be categorized according to the two dominant models for scientific organization established during the seventeenth century. One was that of the Paris Académie des Sciences, the generic ‘academy’, frequently found on the Continent. The other, the ‘society’ model exemplified by the Royal Society, emerged in the less stratified societies of Britain, the United States, and Holland. Both types are united by their possession of chartered corporate status and written rules. They convened regular meetings, appointed officers, and elected a restricted number of fellows. In addition to official quarters, they often claimed libraries, collections, botanical gardens, and observatories.

Important distinctions, however, may also be drawn between the academy and society models. Academies, more so than societies, tended to be state-supported institutions; the state accordingly extracted its due by controlling their duties and responsibilities. Societies enjoyed much more autonomy and independence, but because they lacked a clearly defined mission, they tended to be less productive. The internal structure of the two forms of scientific institution differed significantly, which may be illuminated by comparing the Académie des Sciences with the Royal Society.

The Académie des Sciences possessed a restricted, yet heterogeneous membership, stratified in a strict hierarchy. Its officers were drawn from its two constituent classes, the regular and the honorary members. At the top of the scientific core of regular members (pensionnaires, who were paid pensions for their services) were eighteen individuals, three of whom represented each of the Académie’s six sections: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, anatomy, chemistry, and botany, in addition to the permanent secretary and treasurer. Below them in the hierarchy were twelve associate and twelve adjunct members. Nonresident members who did not have to attend meetings but who were excluded from decision-making came next: twelve members from the provinces, eight distinguished foreign scientists, and seventy corresponding members. On average, the Académie could claim just over one hundred and fifty members at any point during the eighteenth century, with fewer than fifty among the resident scientific core. In total, only 716 men belonged to the Académie over the course of the century.

The Royal Society – ‘larger, less professional and exclusive, and more homogeneous’, in the words of James McClellan – was no match for the success of the Académie des Sciences, where scientific accomplishment, finally, was the currency of admission. The Royal Society averaged 325 fellows, seven times the size of the core group in Paris, with nonscientists outnumbering scientists two to one. Election was decided by the membership itself. Without any internal differentiation of its membership into categories or classes, the society became too unwieldy to conduct administrative matters, let alone prosecute any kind of joint scientific endeavours, at its weekly meetings. During the eighteenth century, a twenty-one member elected council, led by an increasingly powerful president, assumed all administrative responsibilities and became the ‘guiding force’ of the Society.

Both the Paris Académie and the Royal Society spawned imitators elsewhere. Academies in Montpellier, Turin, and Mannheim, for example, imitated Paris’s example. Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society copied the Royal Society. A new hybrid form introduced during and characteristic of the eighteenth century was the ‘universal’ society devoted to both science and the arts. The Royal Society of Edinburgh contained literary and scientific sections; the Royal Irish Academy was divided into science, belles lettres, and antiquities. The typical French provincial society dedicated itself to science, belles lettres, and the mechanical arts. German academies often focused on wissenshaftlichen disciplines. Those in Göttingen and Prague had sections for physical, mathematical, and historical sciences. As McClellan summarizes this diversity, when resources were scarce, the ‘multi-area’ institution was adopted; the ‘single field type’ emerged where resources were plentiful.

The most important scientific societies of the eighteenth century were official institutions, legally recognized by their respective governments. This legal status conferred important privileges on the societies, including technological consulting, control of the scientific press, and self-government. McClellan argues that according to this arrangement, institutions and governments ‘struck a deal’, whereby institutions received ‘recognition, funding, and privileges in exchange for technical service and advice’. In essence, societies and academies sold their expertise and knowledge for the power to control the practice of science within their own cultural milieu. The emerging nation states of Europe supported scientific societies as a gesture of alliance with the forces of rational enlightenment, progress, and modernization.

Scientific associations, coming in many shapes and sizes, also may be arranged according to a pyramid of importance. An elite group of national academies in capital cities belong to the top of the hierarchy: the Royal Society, the Paris Académie, the Berlin Academy, the St Petersburg Academy, and the Royal Swedish Academy. Almost all were devoted to scientific pursuits exclusively; they received generous support and powerful privileges, often dating back a century or more. At the next level fall a host of institutions founded in large urban centres and provincial capitals; these include societies and academies in Edinburgh, Montpellier, Göttingen, Bologna, and Philadelphia. They received only modest financial revenues, they tended to be founded later in the eighteenth century, and they cultivated nonscientific subjects alongside science. The scientific accomplishments of this more heterogeneous group were less uniform and less sustained. The base of the pyramid rested on institutions that never built a reputation; these include societies at Marseilles, Barcelona, and Rotterdam, for example. Many were founded in smaller towns and cities late in the century and did not obtain official recognition for years. They cultivated a range of disciplines and possessed undistinguished memberships.

What makes the eighteenth century unique for the institutionalization of science is that individual organizations – big or little, national or local – interacted to forge a larger institutional network. As the Memoirs of the Medical Society of London, founded in 1773, stated: ‘The principal part of our knowledge must be ever derived from comparing our own observations with those of others. In this view the utility of societies, which afford an opportunity for the mutual communication of our thoughts, must be sufficiently apparent.’ Sending memoirs and soliciting exchanges became a routine activity. This meant that scientific research and information could henceforth be circulated through regular channels. At issue here is something other than publication, which had already been inaugurated through the system of official journals; rather, academic publications found an assured venue of distribution. In a word, the academies began to ‘market’ science, having done their utmost to create an audience.

Nineteenth-century consolidation

Once firmly established in the collective consciousness, scientific societies and academies became arbiters of science. With the French revolutionary zeal to abolish privilege in all of its manifestations, it is hardly surprising that the Académie des Sciences became a prime target. It was an institution, even an instrument, of the king, and it was a bastion of elitism. Myths were perpetuated about how self-taught artisans presented their inventions to a jaded academy, only to be rebuffed and humiliated. Not only did the Académie represent an intellectual aristocracy, but it contained a special class of honorary members selected from the social aristocracy. It met for the last time on 21 December 1792; it re-emerged in 1795 as the First Class (or division) of the Institut de France. (With the restoration of the monarchy, the former title of Académie was likewise restored.)