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By Root 2053 0

a better way of grinding lenses, and displayed his own phenomena of colors. He proposed too a way of communicating "intelligence" across great distances by using telescopes and a secret character, and one day the fellows trooped out of Arundel House to see it tried across the Thames. Once more, all this was just how things were supposed to work. Interestingly, however, Hooke himself now hinted at his own doubts about the Society's protocols - doubts that had been festering for years, as we know from his diary. He declined to register his discourse on the communication device, for example. Such a demurral was not unknown-it usually indicated that a fellow wanted to publish autonomously-but in Hooke's case it reflected a growing skepticism about the integrity of the Society's own authorship system. Soon he had to be explicitly reminded to deliver his account of telescopes "to be registered, to preserve his discoveries from being usurped."And his exchange withNewton on light was registered onlywhen Newton's more formal response arrived for perusal."i These were small signs, but together they connoted misgivings as to the whole system.

Yet Hooke was always in demand to do more perusals of the books and letters that arrived so regularly at the Society, so he could not sustain attention on any one topic for very long. As his focus shifted, the incipient confrontation with Newton died down. But it had raised important questions, and in 1675, inevitably, they surfaced again. Newton now found himself challenged by a group of Liege Jesuits-Francis Line, Anthony Lucas, andJohn Gascoines.22This new series of exchanges breached more unambiguously the protocols of reading. Whereas Hooke had accepted Newton's reported observations but denied their conclusiveness, Line in particular denied some of Newton's reported experimental findings. The Society therefore undertook "upon the reading of a letter of his" to perform the experiment itself. Its experimenter was, of course, Hooke. He failed to replicate Newton's result. Occurring just as the Societywas reading a second and far more comprehensive letter from Newton himself on light, this experience finally sparked open hostility.

The clash centered on accusations about authorship and its violation. Newton remarked that, on a rare visit to the Society, he had heard Hooke discourse on diffraction. Newton himself had then observed that diffraction might be a special case of refraction. "To this Mr. Hooke was then pleased to answer, that though it should be but a new kind of refraction, yet it was a new one," Newton recalled. "What to make of this unexpected reply, I knew not; having no other thoughts, but that a new kind of refraction might be as noble an invention as any thing else about light." But it led him to remember that "I had seen the experiment before in some Italian author." The author was, in fact, "Honoratus Faber, in his dialogue De Lumine, who had it from Grimaldo." Newton's implication, which Oldenburg had accentuated by careful editing, seemed unmistakablethat Hooke had elided his appropriation from these earlierwriters. Stung, Hooke responded in kind. The core of Newton's own discourse on light, he retorted, was "contained in his [Hooke's] Micrographia, which Mr. Newton had only carried farther in some particulars."13 Newton then declared that Hooke had "borrowed" much from Descartes, and that in his more recent discussions he had done the same from Newton's own work. He added that he himself had always taken care to acknowledge Hooke's authorship of natural facts where he had used them.24 With that, as it became increasingly hard to see how this contest could be tamped down, Newton broke off correspondence altogether. He had meant to publish a book on light and colors; this he now abandoned, not to return to it until decades later, when Hooke was safely dead. His retreat was not entirely unsignaled -he had already told Oldenburg that he wanted to "concern my self no further about the promotion of Philosophy"-but it was still highly unorthodox. And it seemed that it was the