4
4
reading Christian Huygen’s
Cosmotheoros.
Only an unbound copy of
the Latin edition (1699) of that is in the Library now but Dr Plume also
had the original English edition (of 1698) [14] and the curious features
of Cotes’ story are, first, that Dr Plume’s decision to devote a very large
proportion (£1,902) of his estate to the creation of the professorship
came only towards the end of his life, when he was 68; second, that
Cosmotheoros
was not a seminal treatise on the discoveries in this
developing field of exact scientific research but an imaginative exercise
akin to science fiction, consisting of “conjectures concerning the
inhabitants, plants and productions of the worlds in the planets”. Roger
Cotes implied that his professorship existed merely because an old man
had developed a curiosity about “Life in Outer Space”. Why, then, are
there so many serious, objective studies in this Library— the treatises
and published letters and tabulated observations by Tycho Brahe,
Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Jeremiah Horrocks— which were all
published long before 1698? And why had not these provoked the good
Doctor into planning a professorship in astronomy?
The terms of Dr Plume’s bequest are also curiously at odds with the
academic scientific intentions he might have been expected to have had.
The professor was to have very light academic duties and instead of
being a Fellow residing in a college he was to live in a town house so
that “any ingenious Scholar or Gentleman may resort to him at all
proper seasons to be instructed in the knowledge of Astronomy . . .”.
Not, however, in the details of Newtonian physics, the calculus or
theoretical astronomy but more generally about “The Globes,
Navigation, Natural Philosophy, Dialling and other practical parts of the
Mathematics ” [2.1]. The clients of this professor were thus to be those
virtuosi
who had for long patronised the museums, galleries and
observatories of Europe, such as the gentleman depicted in a Flemish
painting of c.1630 [63(a)], whiling away time in an art gallery with
books, a globe, a chart, an astrolabe, navigation instruments, medals and
miniatures, the curios with which collectors like Elias Ashmole, Ralph
Thoresby and the Fellows of the Royal Society packed their public
rooms.
As one explores the books in this Library these anomalies are joined
by an awareness of a curious impartiality in the choice of