3
3
A Director of the British Museum Library was thus led to describe
Thomas Plume’s books as “a personal working library of a scholar with
wide interests in all fields of learning” [1(a)]. Yet curious anomalies
appear if the Library’s contents are searched for biographical material
which would be more precise than impressions (such as these) produced
by a superficial matching of the books’ subject-matter with the known
outlines of Plume’s life.
If he was indeed an informed amateur mathematician whose
objectives included collecting the major authorities’ work, it is odd that
his books do not include (nor ever did, so far as can be ascertained) the
Principia Mathematica
of Isaac Newton, published by the Royal
Society in 1687, nor John Wallis’
Arithmetica Infinitorum
(1655)
setting out the differential calculus from which Newton developed his
theories and discoveries. Strange, too, that if the books indicate a special
interest in astronomy and, indeed, all those other developing areas of
what he called Natural and Experimental Philosophy (to us, the Natural
Sciences), he never became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He acquired
its
Transactions;
he bought the
History
setting out the Society’s
objectives and philosophy, written by a man who subsequently became
his bishop [11); he had a copy of a fine, illustrated catalogue of its
Museum [12]. But he cannot be found directly associated with the Royal
Society, nor with Gresham’s College, another London institution which
had sponsored the development of scientific and mathematical research
in the mid-17th century and he gave shelf-space to two works attacking
the Society’s aims [13]. There is more on astrology, such as the
Discourse
of Sir Christopher Heydon “manifestly proving,” so its title
claims, “the powerful influence of the planets and fixed stars upon
elementary bodies ’’ (published in 1650 from a manuscript composed
before 1623) than might be expected of a patron of the new sciences.
There is a story about the formation of the Plumeian Professorship
which comes to us at third hand. If true, it puts his generous endowment
of the natural sciences in an unexpected light. About 1730 Robert Smith,
kinsman of the second occupier of this Chair, recorded that the First
professor, Roger Cotes, had said that Dr Plume was “induced” to create
this endowment by