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By Root 2049 0

did validate the appearance of gentlemen as authors, which otherwise might seem immodest. Once approved by the Society, Edward Tyson said, his authorship became an "allowable boldness."9 This rather delicately balanced position had to be restated many times, and there is evidence that distant readers were skeptical of it, or even affected to find it incomprehensible. But it was useful nevertheless. It was not yet peer review: it was informal, generally oral, and often governed by civility rather than expertise. Yet the distant origins of peer review do indeed lie here.

If being an experimental author was tricky, however, being an experimental reader was no less so. Leading protagonists like Newton and Robert Boyle were quite able to move back and forth between what they acknowledged to be different reading conventions, depending on what kind of knowledge they were dealing with and to whom theywere talking. In the Society itself, however, four relatively discrete stages characterized and shaped the conduct of reading. I have called these presentation, perusal, registration, and publication (which might well take place via correspondence rather than print).10 Briefly, formal presentations of papers and books happened almost every week, and furnished the Society's major "occasions for discourse."The response often took the form of a "perusal" - a delegated reading, carried out by two fellows who took the work away, examined it for a week or two, and reported back. Many perusals were detailed and creative, leading to new experiments, and some took weeks to deliver. Further conversation and experiment inspired by the perusal would then ensue, and they too might continue for weeks, or even months (and, on exceptional occasions, years)." This kind of process constituted the mainstay of the Society's work. Without perusal, it was unlikely that a submission would lead to any conversation at all, and hence to any new experimental knowledge. And a perusal was often characterized after the event as the reading of the Society itself, collectively-not least by authors and booksellers eager to trumpet it as an endorsement in a bid for customers.

Within the Society, registration often accompanied presentation and perusal.12 The submission was transcribed into a manuscript volume, which was held under lock and key by the secretary. A machine or artifact submitted could likewise be boxed up and deposited. These records were then kept secret, in order to secure achievements from what was called "usurpation."13 Internally, the register soon built up into an archive of discoveries, to which the Society could lay claim not as author, but as facilitator, securer, and virtual judge of authorship. Defenders of the experimental philosophy thus came to refer to the register whenever they were challenged to show evidence that the activity had achieved any results. But therein lay a problem. The register was confidential. As a result, while it might succeed in securing authorship within the Society itself -and that might be enough to attract some outsiders to send it their discoveries -it could do little for audiences beyond its walls. Nor could it persuade skeptics that the virtuosi were creating useful knowledge. Both reasons help to explain why Oldenburg resolved to deploy a new kind of printed object that would extend the register's reach across London and Europe. Submissions would still be registered at the Society, but some would be called forth as what one fellow called "ambassadors." They would represent their authors, the Society, and the enterprise of experimental philosophy itself in a new "public register" that would be printed regularly and distributed through the European book trade. Invented and administered by Oldenburg, this public register was named by him Philosophical Transactions. 14

The Philosophical Transactions has survived to the present as the first scientific journal. It is not always easy, therefore, to remember what a strange object it must have seemed when it first appeared. It started out as a peculiar mixture of correspondence