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Meanwhile the conventions of experimental reading proceeded to play a part in the subsequent shaping of Newton's career.28 The writing and publication of the Principia in 1687 is perhaps the paramount example. Halley shepherded it through the perusal sequence, and the Society extracted it from Newton by offering to register it "for the securing [of] his invention to himself till such time as he could be at leisure to publish it." (It was then printed, rather appropriately, in the printing house that John Streater had built up in his alliance with Richard Atkyns to fight for the law patent.) But Newton's subsequent apotheosis into a national and scholarly hero resulted from yet another series of encounters with the Society's protocols of reading and circulating texts. At first, he was subject to them; after the Principia, he was their master and their manipulator. That process was not only a result of his success, but also a major component of it. He long continued to sway between dramatic public statement and reclusive silence, as is well known. Historians tend to attribute this pattern to aspects of Newton's own character.29 But that is a one-sided perception: his decisions were equally shaped by the specific reading, archiving, and publishing practices of the realm into which he was venturing. The Newton who in 1712-13 masterminded the demolition of Leibniz's claim to the calculus -a demolition based squarely in the textual archives of perusal and registration-had learned to be a supreme exponent of Society reading protocols. He was no longer the distant scholar who had been hounded back to Cambridge by Hooke and the Jesuits.

The point of the Royal Society's reading regime was never to eliminate disputes like those through which Newton prospered. On the contrary, it was meant to generate them. The intent was to produce fertile engagements between people who thought differently and who might otherwise have had no common ground on which to meet. The Society's civility served first to bring this about, and then to limit and manage the resulting disagreements. Indeed, genteel civility itself-of which Society manners were something of an offshoot-implied not bland acquiescence in what one read, but constructive response to it. A witness at a French literary academy of the time expressed the point well. He "observed in what manner works were there examined," and saw "that it was not a businesse of compliments and flatteries, where each one commends that he might be commended, but that they did boldly and freely censure even the least faults." By this "he was filled with joy and admiration."30 The Royal Society wanted to operate in much this way. Its practices were meant to create, structure, and sustain disagreement at least as much as to foster consensus. That disputes occurred was not, then, evidence of their failure. On the contrary, that disputes kept occurring was powerful evidence of their success.

A very important point needs to be made here. The Society's register, like the Stationers', served to identify not only a form of propriety, but also a characteristic kind of transgression. For the Stationers, the distinctive offense was just then starting to be called piracy. For the experimenters, the corresponding term was not piracy, at first, but usurpation, or sometimes plagiary. This kind of offense now became the besetting sin of the enterprise itself. Not that there was anything new about plagiary itself, just as there was nothing new about unauthorized reprinting. One thinks of the well-known battles between Tycho Brahe and Ursus, or between Galileo and Marius. But such disputes had been explosive affairs between fractious foes, blowing apart any prospect of collaboration in an escalating welter of accusations, libels, and threats - sometimes including death threats. Time and again, Boyle, Hooke, and others lamented the prevalence outside the Royal Society of such malfeasance. They invoked it routinely to their colleagues and counterparts, conjuring images of catastrophic outcomes to encourage them