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946J Thomas Sprat 

The History of the Royal-Society of London, For the Improving of Natural Knowledge.

London : printed by T[homas]. R[oycroft]. for J. Martyn at the Bell without Temple-bar, and J. Allestry at the Rose and Crown in Duck-lane, printers to the Royal Society, MDCLXVII. [1667]    Price $4,300

Quarto 4to (9 1/4 x 7 in.; 235 x 178).Signatures: [π] A-B⁴ A-Z⁴ Aa-Zz⁴Aaa-Iii⁴.  First issue with “of” repeated on p.85 lines 6/7. This copy has the  very rare frontispiece by Hollar Imprimatur leaf A1 with engraved arms of the Royal Society on the verso, engraved allegorical frontispiece by Wencelaus Hollar depicting the crowning of a bust of Charles II flanked by mathematician Lord Viscount William Brouncker and Sir Francis Bacon , missing in many copies. The edition of this work by Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitemore Jones (1958, p.ix) speaks of large-paper copies, which had a frontispiece by Wenceslaus Hollar showing a bust of Charles II. It is presumed that all copies have the illustration of the Royal Society coat of arms on the half-title verso plus the two diagrammatic plates. The Huntington copy with the Charles II plate is no different in other respects. This copy is bound in original full calf.

A foundational charter of the Scientific Revolution.
Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal-Society (1667) is the first official institutional manifesto of the Royal Society of London, issued only seven years after the Society received its royal charter and at the very moment when the “new science” was defining itself against scholastic and humanist traditions. Commissioned by the Fellows and written by one of its earliest members, it sets out—systematically and programmatically—the Society’s aims, methods, and philosophical commitments: empiricism, experiment, collective observation, plain style, mechanical explanations of nature, and a conscious break with the authority-based learning of the past. Sprat codifies what would soon be known as the “Baconian programme,” presenting the Society as the practical realization of Francis Bacon’s call for a cooperative, experiment-driven natural philosophy.

The book is equally important as a work of self-fashioning. Sprat defends the Society from critics, argues for the moral and political usefulness of experimental knowledge, and articulates its distinctive linguistic ideal—anti-rhetorical, stripped of ornament, trustworthy because transparent—which would shape English scientific prose for generations. The work is also one of the earliest published accounts of the laboratories, instruments, and experimental procedures of the founding Fellows—Boyle, Hooke, Wilkins, Wren, Wallis—making it a primary historical source for the early development of chemistry, microscopy, physiology, and mechanical philosophy.

The rare Wenceslaus Hollar frontispiece, present in this copy, is itself a visual statement of the Society’s identity: a temple of experimental knowledge flanked by scientific instruments and crowned by the Royal arms, asserting the cultural legitimacy and public mission of the new science. Many early copies lack it, making its presence a notable point of completeness.

Sprat’s History stands today as the first systematic exposition of the ethos that would dominate Enlightenment science: cooperative research, methodological skepticism, precise reporting, and the disciplined accumulation of empirical facts. It is, quite literally, the book that taught Europe how to recognize—and trust—the new experimental philosophy.

ESTC R16577; Wing S5032; Norman 1989; Keynes, Evelyn 178; Hooke 28

The Cope & Jones edition (1958)