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and pamphlet. There was no great precedent for using print to circulate learned claims periodically in this way, although several Continental groups and individuals had advanced ideas along comparable lines. Periodical publication itself was far more widely, and justly, associated with newsbooks and the like-organs as renowned for their claims to truth and accuracy as for their actual peddling of lies and errors. 'S And sure enough, the new journal's footing remained precarious, not least because Oldenburg never managed to produce the Latin version on which his plans for economic independence had depended. At first it often missed its intended monthly appearance (it did not help that the first two years of its life happened to be those of the plague and the Great Fire). Yet as the Philosophical Transactions filtered through the channels of the international book trade -being translated, excerpted, reprinted, and reread as it went- so it took with it an image of the Royal Society's conventions, and of the centrality to those conventions of reading and registration. Its success may well have depended, in fact, on the unauthorized reprints that Oldenburg ostentatiously sought to suppress. Continental philosophers responded, both to them and to his original. They embraced the initiative, and their contributions sustained the Society itself as the fervor of its local membership inevitably waned. In those terms the Philosophical Transactions proved astoundingly successful.

Register and periodical thus became twin bulwarks of a new form of learned practice, the anchors of experimental civility. Perusal gave rise to conversation; conversation inspired experiments; experiments led to reports and correspondence; and publication then restarted the cycle. Quite simply, this was how the experimental philosophy worked. Early modern science came into being as a self-sustaining process -a kind of social perpetual motion machine that, in some respects, has not stopped turning ever since.

Not every submission to the Society went through precisely this sequence, and departures from the norm were not necessarily seen as transgressions. But sometimes they were, and when that happened the results could be far-reaching. Some of the more violent-and fruitful-disputes of the era hinged precisely on accusations that the Society's reading regime had been subverted.16 Hooke for onewas prone to detecting heinous contraventions of this kind, especially on Oldenburg's part. In the end Hooke carried out what he had long privately threatened, and withdrew altogether from the regime, pending its complete reconstitution. Yet it is at least equally remarkable that such crises did not, in the end, destroy the custom. Very quickly it became so valuable that it was preserved in the face of even the blatant contraventions alleged byHooke (who denounced Oldenburg as a spy, selling English secrets to the philosopher of Louis XIV, Christiaan Huygens). And the resolutions, too, of some of the most important of those disputes hung on the management of the archives that had been created by the Society's reading practices. The greatest exponent of such management was to be Isaac Newton.

ISAAC NEWTON AND THE REJECTION OF PERUSAL

Newton was, of course, the dominant figure to emerge in English natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His emergence took shape through repeated episodes of engagement with the perusal-registration-circulation sequence. The first of these spanned the period from his initial introduction to the Royal Society in early 1672 to his declaration six years later that he was withdrawing and ceasing all philosophical correspondence. From Newton's study in Cambridge, the Society's way of reading had looked less like courtesy than affront. The same cycle of engagement and retreat he then repeated several timesuntil, that is, he found himself in a position to dominate the sequence himself. At that point he was able to put it to very effective use, to become perhaps the foremost author in the history of the sciences.