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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:
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
Yet such Effects of the Macassars Arts [i.e. sympathetic poisonings] are unknown to us' (165. CP, Slo.: Macassar dartes);
[Cinnamon has] a most Excellent taste; so that by Sunning it looseth rather than acquires any taste or force; the Tree being pill'd is cut down to the root; but the young Sprigs after a year or two give the best and finest Cinnamon' (169. Slo.: evil for 'exct' of CP and adds before 'young Sprigs' the Surac or);
It [saltpetre] is no sooner dilated by Rain-water, or the Moisture of
The use of Allum is to be a Vinculum between the Cloth and the Colour, as clammy-Oyls and Gum-waters are in Painting and Limming' (290. CP: claying-Oyls; R: Clayie Oyls).
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.
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