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By Root 2028 0

with Stationers, seeking to join forces with a community it could not master. It became a licenser too, endorsing the authenticity and legitimacy of its printed works by means of an iniprintatux And, perhaps above all, it pioneered practices of reading. As with all experiments, not all its ventures succeeded. One in particular, the publication of Francis Willughby's Historia Pisciuln, was a notoriously calamitous failure. But together these efforts amounted to a sustained bid to ally craft propriety with learned gentility. To the extent that they did succeed, in later generations the efforts themselves retreated into self-evidence. That was the principal achievement of the Society: to cement together the scientific and printing revolutions so that the seam became invisible.

If there is one thing that everyone knows about the experimental philosophy, it is that that philosophy was indeed experimental. It depended on doing things, and on showing the things that were done to other people. That is, the Royal Society created practical demonstrations of natural "facts," the demonstrations themselves being called experiments.3 But experimental philosophy also rested on repeated acts ofwriting, printing, and reading. In fact, the Society's practices intersected at every point with the world of the book. For example, the "matters of fact" that it created in its experiments were collected in great register books, which rather resembled the registers of London trade companies like the Stationers, or, in another light, the commonplace books of Renaissance scholars.4 It then circulated written and printed reports of some register entries both within its own fellowship and abroad. Those reports needed to carry with them a degree of authenticity and authority, in order to warrant the commitment of distant readers. Their recipients would then respond by entrusting their own documents to the Society, which would duly register them, thus creating a perpetual and fruitful circulation. Experimental philosophy depended for its very existence on this circulation continuing and expanding.

Like commonplaces, facts were to be epistemic foundation stonestools for building a conversation rather than objects over which to dispute. The most dedicated experimenter of them all, Robert Hooke, left instructions for how to lay out a register of experimental facts that owed a clear debt to scholarly note-taking techniques.5 Yet the registration of experimental reports differed in one respect. For facts to count, they supposedly had to be witnessed by an audience-ideally on repeated occasions. Their registration was therefore part and parcel of learned sociability.And their reading too was consequently not a private act, in principle, but a social gesture. It took place for a group of educated, privileged, and (here, at least) sober gentlemen. Sometimes this meant actually reading aloud before them; on other occasions reading might well be carried out alone, but with an eye to displaying its consequences to the group at the next weekly meeting. In either case, experimental reading took on a rather formal, even ceremonial, air.7

Perhaps paradoxically, the individual character of this reading was what made it such a key component of experimental philosophy. It was the diversity of perspectives brought to bear by readers inArundel House and Gresham College, where Society meetings took place, that mattered. That diversity was what qualified the virtuosi to regard the claims that emerged as robust. So reading was at once a cementer of social bonds-it helped to constitute the Society as a community -and a guarantor that what that community eventually published should indeed be accounted knowledge. (Many later writers would come to characterize objectivity itself in such terms.8) While experiments and their reading were indeed collective enterprises - and the former often relied on the labor of anonymous "laborants"- the Society as awhole did not lay claim to authorship. It was to be an arena for debate, not a participant, and had to stay above the fray. But it