Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
was not a healthy young man - he took further lessons in art and
sketching before going up to Oxford. There he came under the influ-
ence of Robert Boyle and became hooked on science. In 1662 he
returned to London where he took up a non-stipendiary post as
Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, and in the following
year was admitted as a Fellow, which brought him into close contact
with all the academic thinkers in England at the time. His work there
encompassed research into nearly every facet of science that existed.
By 1664 he was being paid by the Royal Society but also secured a
professorship at Gresham College in London. He was a prolific note-
taker and kept numerous laboratory topics that were festooned with
scribbles, sketches of equipment designed by himself, notes, casual
thoughts and sundry scientific results. Many of his observations on
natural history were included in his Micrographia, or Some physio-
logical descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses,
with observations and inquiries thereupon, published in 1665.
This was a treatise on the natural world as seen under the lens of a
microscope, and is one of the earliest examples of this genre; such
topics became commonplace in the popular scientific market in
the 1850s. Hooke was by no means an easy man, and was consi-
dered by many to be somewhat miserly, although he did leave a sub-
stantial fortune on his death. He clashed not infrequently with
his colleagues in the Royal Society (including Newton, who he felt
had plagiarised some of his data on the matter of the motion of the
planets), but by 1677 he had been elected one of its secretaries and so
felt that he held some power and influence. Hooke died in his rooms at
Gresham College on 3 March 1703 and his effects were dispersed soon
afterwards. Some found their way into the collections of the Royal
Society, others simply vanished. He was given a 'Nobell funerall', at
which his friends were offered fine wines by his executors and heirs,
after which he was buried at St Helen's Church, Bishopsgate, in
London.
Many of Hooke's geological observations were delivered in a
series of lectures to the Royal Society in 1668, but not published
