Wednesday 28 November 1666

Up, and with Sir W. Pen to White Hall (setting his lady and daughter down by the way at a mercer’s in the Strand, where they are going to lay out some money), where, though it blows hard and rains hard, yet the Duke of York is gone a-hunting. We therefore lost our labour, and so back again, and by hackney coach to secure places to get things ready against dinner, and then home, and did the like there, and to my great satisfaction: and at noon comes my Lord Hinchingbroke, Sir Thomas Crew, Mr. John Crew, Mr. Carteret, and Brisband. I had six noble dishes for them, dressed by a man-cook, and commended, as indeed they deserved, for exceeding well done. We eat with great pleasure, and I enjoyed myself in it with reflections upon the pleasures which I at best can expect, yet not to exceed this; eating in silver plates, and all things mighty rich and handsome about me. A great deal of fine discourse, sitting almost till dark at dinner, and then broke up with great pleasure, especially to myself; and they away, only Mr. Carteret and I to Gresham College, where they meet now weekly again, and here they had good discourse how this late experiment of the dog, which is in perfect good health, may be improved for good uses to men, and other pretty things, and then broke up. Here was Mr. Henry Howard, that will hereafter be Duke of Norfolke, who is admitted this day into the Society, and being a very proud man, and one that values himself upon his family, writes his name, as he do every where, Henry Howard of Norfolke.

Thence home and there comes my Lady Pen, Pegg, and Mrs. Turner, and played at cards and supped with us, and were pretty merry, and Pegg with me in my closet a good while, and did suffer me ‘a la baiser mouche et toucher ses cosas’ upon her breast, wherein I had great pleasure, and so spent the evening and then broke up, and I to bed, my mind mightily pleased with the day’s entertainment.

32 Annotations

First Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

The Royal Society today at Gresham College — from the Hooke Folio Online

Nouemb: 28. There was produced by mr Hooke a new kind of Leuell by including a large bubble of air in a glasse pipe hauing its sides exactly blown & filled with warter and sealed vp at both ends. The producer was orderd to bring in its decriptions and manner of application to practise -

The same [ Mr Hooke ] produced a new kind of Bookstaff for taking altitudes, as also an augur or Instrument to take vp earth with. of both which he was likewise orderd to giue in a Description and manner of vsing them

(mr Pouey west indian curiositys (Oldenburg. deuonshire curiositys. gold and bitt. a kind of vegetable)
mr King a foetus in spt. of wine) mr Hoskins a locust from the canarys)
mr Hooke produced a substance said to be the eggs of a Rayfish
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bato… ]

(Wallis obserue: about tides)

obs: for next day a new kind of watch - and optick glasses vpon new principles. to be produced by the Curator [ Mr Hooke ] -

http://webapps.qmul.ac.uk/cell/Ho…

Michael L  •  Link

Around four deadly sins today:

Gluttony: "We eat with great pleasure..."

Pride / Avarice: "...eating in silver plates, all things mighty rich and handsome about me."

Lust: "Pegg with me in my closet a good while..."

Missing today: Sloth, Wrath and Envy.

Sloth is usually the hardest to find with Sam, though "Up late today" does turn up from time to time. Wrath and Envy often crop up when talking of his office colleagues or household.

CGS  •  Link

strange: The Howards of Norfolk a well known Catholick family,???

The Commons dothe proceed with the hunt for new funds.

CGS  •  Link

forgiveness sort of me Lordly ones.
Ld. Rockingham, Privilege: Dr. Wake released.

Upon reading the humble Petition of Doctor George Wake; acknowledging his hearty Sorrow for his great Offence given to this House, in issuing out a Process against the Lord Rockingham; and praying the Favour of this House and of the Lord Rockingham, that he may be discharged from the Restraint under which he now lieth for the same:

It is ORDERED, by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled (the Lord Rockingham declaring his Willingness thereunto), That the said George Wake be, and is hereby, discharged from his present Restraint: And this shall be a sufficient Warrant on that Behalf.

CGS  •  Link

More land to be taken from the goose and goose girl.
More land to be created by the Dutch in Fen country.
More coins to be forged at the Mint.
Must Stopp the populace from using credit.
More lands to be sold to pay off big debts.
House of Lords be very busy to day.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"There was produced by mr Hooke a new kind of Leuell by including a large bubble of air in a glasse pipe hauing its sides exactly blown & filled with warter and sealed vp at both ends"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spir…

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Only partially on topic, but indulge me. My new Droid phone has a spirit level application. A graphic of a tube level (phone vertical) or a bull's eye level (phone flat) appears on the screen, and the position of the bubble is taken from the phone's internal position sensors. It's extremely accurate, and usable wherever one would use a regular carpenter's level. It tickles me to think how much Sam, and the guys over at the RS, would have loved today's technology. And it sobers me to realize that to some extent we owe it to them.

tonyt  •  Link

Henry Howard of Norfolk a Catholic? Yes indeed. This diary entry demonstrates that, at the highest levels of Society and at this time, being a Catholic was hardly a bar to anything. When Henry became Duke of Norfolk in 1677 he had no problem over becoming a member of the House of Lords. However, a year later - as a result of the Popish Plot - he was disbarred from the House of Lords and went in to exile. (It is quite possible that he was thrown out of the Royal Society at the same time but I am not sure about this.)

JWB  •  Link

"...and other pretty things..."
With today's fraudulent and rent-seeking science wearing away western weltanschauung, suggest this essay on Boyle, knowledge production & "vitual witness" at foundation of the Royal Scoiety by Steven Shapin, entitled: "Pump and Circumstance": http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=…

Terry Foreman  •  Link

The argument of Boyle and the RS seems to be that, as eye-witness testimony establishes legal "facts," so the same establishes the "facts" of natural philosophy (science).

We all know how unreliable eye-witness testimony is in the legal case. This was explained by the godfather of the RS's experimental (=experiential) method, Sir Francis Bacon: "For the sense by itself is a thing infirm and erring; neither can instruments for enlarging or sharpening the senses do much."

One might think this calls the scientific case into as much questio; but Bacon explains: "all the truer kind of interpretation of nature is effected by instances and experiments fit and apposite; wherein the sense decides touching the experiment only, and the experiment touching the point in nature and the thing itself." I.e., such experiments are lent credibility when the conditions of observation are controlled and what is to be attended to is specified and limited (the color of the floor or time of day matter not to efficacy of the spirit level or air pump).

For Bacon on this point see THE NEW ORGANON, chapter L http://www.constitution.org/bacon…

Michael Robinson  •  Link

eye-witness testimony and the Royal Society

Much is made of the importance of the testimony being by gentleman, whose veracity involved concepts of honor and who had honor to loose. For a lengthy discussion of how this affected concepts of authorship and the idea of the authority and stability of printed texts in an age of freewheeling print culture and a norm of piracy -- for example developing the methodology behind 'Philosophical Transactions' the use of an imprimatur, an official printer and the idea of proofs being checked and corrected by the gentlemen concerned, see
Adrian Johns 'The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making' Chicago UP, 1998 particularly' pp 444-542, 'Piracy and Usurpation Natural Philosophy in the Restoration'; pp 543-621 'Histories of the Heavens.'

Jesse  •  Link

Essay on Boyle...

Also emphasizes "witnessing was to be a collective enterprise. In natural philosophy, as in criminal law, the reliability of testimony depended crucially upon its multiplicity" or from a strictly scientific standpoint, reproducibility.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

….”“Thence home, and there comes my Lady Pen, Pegg, and Mrs. Turner, and played cards and supped with us, and were pretty merry ­ and Pegg with me in my closet a good while, and did suffer me a la besar mucho et tocar ses cosas [to kiss her a great deal and touched the things ] upon her breast ­ wherein I had great pleasure, and so spent the evening; and then broke up, and I to bed, my mind mightily pleased with the day’s entertainment.”
http://www.pepys.info/bits3.html#…

What was our boy Pepys thinking?

GrahamT  •  Link

Paul said: "A graphic of a tube level (phone vertical) or a bull’s eye level (phone flat) appears on the screen, and the position of the bubble is taken from the phone’s internal position sensors....It tickles me to think how much Sam, and the guys over at the RS, would have loved today’s technology."
It tickles me even more to think that people spend hundreds of pounds/dollars, and millions on development to be able to do the same as "a large bubble of air in a glasse pipe having its sides exactly blown & filled with warter and sealed up at both ends." last time I bought a spirit level, it cost me about £5, and it doubles as a straight edge rule (cms and inches). True, I can't make phone calls on it, but I wouldn't be happy putting my phone on wet mortar either.

Paul Chapin  •  Link

That would be a fair point, Graham, if anybody bought the phone to use as a level. The level app is just a cute toy (free for the downloading). The phone itself is the technological marvel.

Robert Gertz  •  Link

"...where, though it blows hard and rains hard, yet the Duke of York is gone a-hunting. We therefore lost our labour, and so back again..."

"War meeting of the Naval Office? Don't they know there's a hunt on?"

And this the more responsible of the brothers...

Robert Gertz  •  Link

"...only Mr. Carteret and I to Gresham College, where they meet now weekly again, and here they had good discourse how this late experiment of the dog, which is in perfect good health, may be improved for good uses to men..."

Much as I admire the spirit of the Enlightment here I'll go with our "fraudulent and rent-seeking science"...Though I suspect both were present in Sam's era in equal portion to our own.

As to the possible human rights violations Sam's and Mr. C's ruminations conjuer up, I was just dealing with our extensive IRB regulatory system for a couple of research studies...While the bureaucratic load wore me down, the slightly scary story was a colleague who blamed an infamous but true research horror story for creating the need for such "claptrap" about patients' right. Delaying her brilliant research on children...(potentially very good work by the way, but I mean...On children?)

Give me the claptrap, please...We can be trusted but only so far...

GrahamT  •  Link

It was meant tongue-in-cheek Paul. I can't help thinking though, that Pepys would be just as astounded at a light metal (aluminium is not avialable for another 150+ years# spirit level with three bubbles for vertical, horizontal and arbitrary angles, and all for small change - and he would be able to understand the principals.
A modern mobile phone, in contrast, would be indistinguishable from witchcraft for 17th century folk. #Disembodied voices, music from the ether, words writing themselves on a glowing mirror, etc. all guaranteed to get you burnt at the stake)

CGS  •  Link

These technical marvels came about because of man's curiosity into why, listening to all those strange tales of weird happenings and then there were fewer people saying it cannot be done, it ain't been done before, NIH, thanks to people cross polluting [sic] each other,and sippin',imbibin' and digestin' all those strange seeds, leaves and fruits from foreign parts.

Then Man liked to fill his time being curios rather than listen to Sunday Sermons or as now with the google box watching adults chase a bladder filled with air, then they made their own balloon and played with it themselves.

CGS  •  Link

"...eye-witness testimony and the Royal Society..."
The society motto be 'not even in words' or better put
"nullius in verba"
show, demonstrate

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Graham, I totally agree. I often think of the famous dictum of the late Arthur C. Clarke: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Harvey  •  Link

The Royal Society motto be ‘not even in words’ or better put “nullius in verba” show, demonstrate

How sad then, that 350 years later the RS should have come to point that it states that the Climate Change 'Science is settled', ie, not to be debated nor shown and demonstrated.

Phil Gyford  •  Link

(Just an aside... please keep things on topic. There are plenty of other places we can discuss climate change. Let's move on, thanks.)

Chris Faulkner  •  Link

What happened to the translations of Sams 'Franglais-Latin'?. I know what he means, but it would be good to have his actual words.

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

Chris, look at Terry's post, above, for a translation.

John Wilson  •  Link

"Pegg with me in my closet a good while, and did suffer me a la besar mucho et tocar ses cosas upon her breast."

Very early in the diary, when Pepys was just starting out, I recall that while traveling he stayed at an inn where several parties slept in a single large room. At that time, Pepys commented that he was afraid to try anything with the women during the night for fear that they would call out.

While Pepys has since then increasing accosted women, it has been mentioned several times that Pepys only has tried his hand with women of a lower station.

This is the first time I recall that he tried it with a social equal. It seems that as Pepys moves up in wealth, status, and experience with women, he is getting bolder.

CGS  •  Link

'tis a reward of pleasure and over coming of fear of getting sanctioned or berated or critiqued.
"he is getting bolder."

Second Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"to Gresham College, where they meet now weekly again, and here they had good discourse how this late experiment of the dog, which is in perfect good health, may be improved for good uses to men, and other pretty things, and then broke up. "

L&M: Birch, ii. 128.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"Here was Mr. Henry Howard, that will hereafter be Duke of Norfolke, who is admitted this day into the Society, and being a very proud man, and one that values himself upon his family, writes his name, as he do every where, Henry Howard of Norfolke."

L&M: He was the second son of the Earl of Arundel, and became 6th Duke of Norfolk in 1677. For his benefactions to the Royal Society he had received a message of thanks, and was now elected a fellols and shortly afterwards a member of the Council: Birch, ii. 128, 131. He is referred to in the society's minutes as 'Mr. Henry Howard of Norfolk'. Later at the prompting of the Duke of York he was to provide Pepys with a parliamentary seat at Castle Rising, Norf., in 1673.

Gerald Berg  •  Link

Our memory is not for remembering the past in exactitude but to be enable us to be able to plan better for tomorrow. Without memory there is no future to be imagined.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

"What was our boy Pepys thinking?"

I suspect thinking does not enter into this. Clearly a suicidal piece of stupidity on his part.

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