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(c): Opportunities for an eclectic text.

Our last category, where some textual errors listed arise probably from copyists' carelessness, gives us the opportunity for some investigation into the source and reliability of the Sloane transcript. As already stated, it seems to have been commissioned for Sloane himself, possibly when the original volume of the Register it duplicates was temporarily misplaced; but the copyist has allowed himself some latitude, for some variants we meet in it appear to be founded on no authority but their own. Often he indulges in tautological paraphrase:

becomes where, it is true, the error may be akin to that noted above which was due to the eye having mistaken the lines of the original, but this does not account elsewhere for the synonym 'squib' for the 'jeer' 'put upon the Portuges' (HRS, 161), nor for 'seed' replacing 'wood' (sc. aloes, which 'comes most from Cambodia, and Siam', 171-172). In the latter instance all manuscripts are changed to the correct reading, 'wood', in a later hand, again probably Birch's, an alteration akin to the erasure, in the Register, of the words 'and Scritores' after the word 'Chests' in the passage in HRS, 165, given as: 'Chests which comes from Jappan into Europe' and to the alteration of the original reading of the manuscripts, 'Pharmocopedia', to conform to HRS 'Pharmocopeia' (167). Likewise the word 'removing', nonsense in its context, has been emended to the correct 'renewing' (Birch, i. 485, has the text correctly as has HRS, 199) in the following (HRS, 232): '[On taking away a pair of bellows thrust into the windpipe of a dissected, yet living, dog, the heart had] convulsive motions; but upon removing the motion of the Bellows, the Heart recovered its former motion.' This may be further evidence for attributing to Birch the Register emendations of Robert Hooke's paper on the weather (HRS, 173ff.); Slo (698, ff. 58-61) seems to be a transcript of R rather than of CP.

Examples of careless mis-copying are, happily, infrequent: only one need be noticed. HRS, 'observabit' (187) for the doubtlessly correct 'aberrabit' of CP and R in the sentence 'Calculus . . . a vero aberrabit' may be compared with the error of 'observe' for 'above' in 'the more Peter you allow it [gunpowder], it will still be the better, till you come to observe Eight parts' (278) to prove that both papers were the work of the same copyist or compositor. In the latter quotation R is again emended to follow the printed text, here of course wrongly.

Small graphical errors rarely affect the sense materially: '. . . People of the Country do take' ('rake,' R) 'it [saltpetre] off the ground' (262-263); '. . . Great Rains may easily bring it to the Lake in Macedonia. . . ' (263), where the Register's 'that Lake' makes clear the point, destroyed in the History text, that the particular lake was one specifically referred to earlier in the paper, citing Pliny: Natural History, X. 107; 'The Stuffs to be dyed are first boyled in Allum-liquors, and the Allum afterwards (as they say) cleared from the said Stuff again' (CP: 'same Stuff'), 'before any Colour at all to be applyed' (288); and 'Some Colours or Stuffs are best dyed by reiterated Dippings ever' (CP: 'even') 'into the same Liquor at several distances of time' (304). Two similar Latin examples are relegated to a footnote for the reason given previously.[12] All manuscript sources agree in the sentence (164): '[Chewing durian] causes a Dirthea, which easily degenerates to a

Tenasmus, by us called Peirsing', where the fourth edition of HRS conjectures and prints 'diarhea'; one hesitates, however, to give the more modern forms 'tenesmos' and 'piercing'. Since the CP draft of the paper about salt-petre is no longer extant we may legitimately make a text compounded of that of HRS and of R, just as editors compound texts of some Shakespearean plays based on the Quarto or Quartos and the Folio; the legitimacy of such a procedure has, of course, been denied. An example is: '. . . Though Peter go alway in Gun-powder, yet if you fulminate it in a Crucible, and burn of[f] the volatile part with Powder of Coal [sc. 'charcoal'], Brimstone, Antimony or Meal, there will remain a Salt' (274-275), where the Register reads 'go all away' in the sense of 'calcine'. Sometimes punctuation can affect the issue: compare with and the following, where the writer is referring to ambergrease: with where the latter perhaps gives the better sense. Finally, readers are invited to take their pick of readings in the following four samples:

Lest the materials presented above be considered ill digested, a word must be said by way of summary. It must be emphasized that they are only samples, intended to show the kind of problem likely to be faced by the editor of a seventeenth century science text: they neither postulate nor prove any thesis. Data are inadequate, for instance, to furnish any clues as to what kind of error, if any, 'T.R.' 's compositors were prone when setting HRS, and the Errata of its first edition are all literals and refer only to Sprat's portion of the book. In what specific tasks, then, may the examples cited be of service? There is much to be done in the publication or republication of seventeenth century science authorities: Boyle, long recognized as an English stylist, needs reprinting; Wren's scientific work has not yet been satisfactorily collected; only recently has the publication of Newton's correspondence been put in hand; and in addition there is the whole corpus of unpublished material by lesser men, British and Continental — it is surprising, moreover, but typical of this state of affairs that although we have a satisfactory biography of Robert Hooke (Margaret 'Espinasse, 1956) we have as yet no collected edition of his works. Rarely, in this discipline, is any one text absolutely authoritative as a source text. One day, nevertheless, we may see the magnum opus of a dictionary, by subjects and by persons, of every major scientific activity in Europe during the century: to such an El Dorado the present paper can only tentatively point the way.