University of Virginia Library

Literary Problems in Seventeenth-Century Scientific Manuscripts
by
H. W. Jones [*]

Of the many anecdotes related in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides one is of especial interest. 'In the 65th page of the first volume of Sir George Mackenzie,'[1] writes Boswell, 'Doctor Johnson pointed out a paragraph beginning with "Aristotle", and told me there was an error in the text, which he bade me to try to discover. I was lucky enough to hit it at once. As the passage is printed it is said that the Devil answers even in engines. I corrected it to — ever in œnigmas. "Sir," (said he), you are a good critick. This would have been a great thing to do in the text of an ancient authour."'[2]

What, in sum, does one expect of the 'good critick' of texts? What qualities should he possess, and what desiderata are to be sought in him? It is a pity that one of the most lively introductions to the subject at large, although with especial reference to dramatic texts, should remain unpublished.[3] At first sight, to quote a practical instance, it

would not seem to require a Theobald or a Bentley to emend the second line of the following: yet caution here is well rewarded; a glance will show that the OED. recognizes the catachrestic usage of 'beatified'. Apart, however, from diffidence in emendation as a prime requisite, one can hardly postulate definite criteria of the textual critic — one can only appraise his text. What is required is, therefore, not advice but rather a practical, and preferably an as yet untrodden, training ground which embraces if possible both print and manuscript versions of a given passage.[5] One possible example, relating to Roger North's Examen (1740) of White Kennet's Compleat History is lost: the first professes that its manuscript is at Jesus College, Cambridge, but it is no longer there.

The purpose of the present paper is to draw attention to another such source of material, one which has as yet hardly been touched by scholars specializing in the transmission of texts. Though the subject matter is of little interest as literature, it is safe to say that hardly a problem which the editor of a Restoration prose text (other than the dramatic) is likely to encounter does not occur there. An immediate advantage of its perusal is the furnishing of a reliable source-text for the writer on the history of science. Clearly this is no place to revive or discuss the logical-positivist interpretation of such material, but it may be pointed out in passing that many of the problems in its interpretation are not 'scientific' at all, but literary or bibliographical, a point which I have stressed elsewhere.[6] The present purpose is twofold: (I) to consider the relevant manuscripts and printed sources, attempting to assess briefly their relative provenance and value, and (II) to note some variants encountered in the texts as the results of (a) deliberate editorial policy, (b) copyists' errors and printers' literals, and (c) instances where a decision may be made between alternatives.

I

A realization of the exact nature of the materials under discussion is essential if the comments on the textual problems which follow are

to be made clear. As their format has been discussed in some detail elsewhere, however,[7] a summary will suffice. In order, the manuscripts are (1) the 'Classified Papers' (hereinafter called CP), the first drafts, often holograph, of scientific matters read or communicated to the Society, of which most were transcribed by the Secretaries into (2) the Register (R), which consists of several folio volumes. The other manuscript source (we disregard the Society's Letter-Book) is interesting as regards its provenance and independent value: it consists of transcripts of selected materials from the CP or from the Register made by copyists for Sir Hans Sloane and these now form certain of (3) the Sloane MSS in the British Museum (Slo.). It is not always clear what their copytext was; in some instances it seems no longer extant, and the reasons for some of their variants, considered later, are often indeterminate: some seem to be honest endeavours to correct or to clarify a corrupt text, as happened in the later Shakespearan Folios, were these manuscript; others are clearly no more than errors in transcription.

Our printed sources are, firstly, those pages of Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society which constitute versions of selected scientific materials contributed by Fellows and form its Second Part. The four editions (1667, 1702, 1722, 1734; the symbol HRS below should be taken as referring to the first, which alone is of any authority) are for practical purposes identically paged. A facsimile reprint of this first edition[8] records only significant variants in the scientific papers; it does not discuss the reasons for any corruptions. In general, variants there available for examination are not repeated here. Next we have Thomas Birch's four volumes (1753-56) of the same title. It suffices our present purpose to note that this work, in the main, consists of transcripts from the Society's Journal illustrated and supplemented by extracts from the Register and from the Letter-Book. What formed the copy for the relevant parts of Sprat and for Birch is unknown: with the former it was probably a fair copy made by clerks either from the CP or from R; Birch probably prepared his own from the same sources, but there is some evidence, in the form of alterations in his hand in R, that he used Sprat where he could. Accordingly he is used little here. Apart from the occasional instance in the later editions of Sprat, noted below, no instance has been found in connection with the

present enquiry where any printed text is of independent authority — one trivial instance may be ignored.[9] The last printed source is the Society's Philosophical Transactions which, broadly speaking, consist of edited versions of scientific papers, much as in Sprat, but published regularly. Most changes are clearly deliberate, and frequently go as far as a complete re-casting of materials. As a couple of small examples we may take the 'Answers return'd by Sir Philiberto Vernatti, Resident in Batavia in Java Major, to certain enquiries. . . .' (Sprat, 158ff.), of which certain of the questions figure in the Transactions (11 March 1666/7, 415-419) in much altered form, and the 'Direction for the observations of the eclipses of the moon', of which the version in Sprat (180 ff.) and in the Transactions (11 February 1666/7, 388-390) differ only in occasional alteration of word-order and other small details.

Fortunately in the printed materials to be dealt with there appear to be no examples of the 'correction-of-a-correction' error (discussed fully by McKerrow in the unpublished lectures already noted) which, if I may recall his argument, are errors at two removes: the compositor cannot read his copy and conjectures, or else he accidentally mis-sets, and a second person, often the proof-reader, sensing an error in the printed proof, alters it yet again, but from his own judgment and without consulting the copy, so causing a double corruption and one very hard to correct once the true manuscript copy has been lost. Finally it must be made clear that only a small sample from the vast manuscript resources available is here being considered — those papers which happen to occur in Birch, Sprat and the Transactions, or in some of them. Few general conclusions will be attempted at the end.

II

(a): Editorial changes.

'It is far more dangerous for a corruption to pass unrecognized than for a sound text to be unjustifiably attacked.'[10] Nowhere can this sage pronouncement be more clearly illustrated than in the materials under discussion.

The R version of 'A relation of the Pico Teneriffe' starts the account with the names of persons supplying the information (cf. Birch, I, 393-394). When the style of the passage is tightened for

publication it is with the loss of interesting detail, as when a personal touch is sacrificed:

or

and

Likewise we have: 'A Friend of his' (HRS, 206) for R's 'one Gilbert Lambell a friend of his'. For some reason vivid points of the narrative are sacrificed, as when 'We descended by a Rope. . .' (204) replaces 'They descended, an active Spanyard shewing them the way, by a Rope' of CP and R. Pugh, the original compiler of the notes, speaks (204) of 'a round Pit of water . . . about six fathom deep. We suppose this Water not a Spring, but dissolved Snow blown in. . .', which is condensed from differing originals but omits CP's 'One of Dr Pughs company drank of the water.' R adds: 'One of Dr Pughs company drank of the water as Mr Lambell reports who plumbed it. We suppose this water; for some yeares it lyes so full, one cannot get into the cave.'

Often the truncations do ensure clarity; the statement that

is condensed from yet the graphic unnecessarily becomes (HRS, 213): An occasional explanatory interpolation is helpful; hence the bare term 'curar' of all the manuscripts becomes in HRS (209), 'Curar, to cure a piece of wood', which also substitutes (205) the neater 'perhaps' for the diffident 'happly & as I conjecture' of the manuscripts in: 'This Plant [the cardencha] is also universally spread over the Island [the Gran Canaria], and is perhaps a kind of Euphorbium.' Often it is an apparently pointless omission, as when HRS and R omit (208) both the short sentence in CP: 'Camells are brought from Lancerote [Lanzarote], besides other Cattell' and the detail: '(In the upper Lands the Corne grows so rank, as two men on horseback, riding at a very smale distance, cannot see each other. The Trees of this Iland are universally greene all the whole yeare.)'

The principles guiding those preparing the version for press will appear clear enough from the foregoing, but a few illustrative examples may be added: 'If I light upon it [sc. Batavian volcanic dust],' writes the Society's correspondent in the East Indies (HRS, 159), '[I] shall send you some', or rather, his editors' words; instead of 'some' he has, and all the manuscripts follow him, 'a muster'. His statement (HRS, 160) that '[boisterous winds do not disturb the] Sea or cause a contrary motion in it, being sheltered by these Mountains' is, in its later portion, altered by the Sloane scribe, perhaps to improve the rhythm of the sentence, perhaps to cover an error in copying and to avoid rewriting, to: '. . . Sea, especially being shelter'd by these mountains, and to cause a contrary motion in it' (Slo. 3959, fol. 16f.) Did not all the manuscripts support the text, with the exception of the word 'here', added by the HRS copywriter (161), one could well suspect the following as corrupt:

Another rather puzzling reading but one which, in conjunction with some points above, may support the hypothesis that the copy for HRS was an edited transcript from R, not from CP, is the unnecessary expansion of the clear reading of Slo. and CP: 'It is forbidden strictly under a great penalty to make use of the same' ['suyker-bier'] into: 'It is forbidden strictly under the penalty of a great pain to make use of the same' (HRS, 162). When no answer was returned (there is a deliberate hiatus in CP) to the question as to 'whether in Pegu there is a poison that kills by smell' R waxes literary: 'Nihil respondet', but HRS (165) politely states that 'To this no Answer was return'd', just

as it changes to 'a pattern' (165) the conversational 'a muster' of all the manuscripts, although by error or design it deprives its readers of the exotic term Juserts for 'a certain winged Ant' which (HRS, 167) produces one kind of gumlac. That those who prepared the copy for the scientific portions of the volume were themselves scientists is proved by an addition they made to a sentence in Sir William Petty's paper on dyeing. He wrote (CP): 'The restringent binding materials are alder bark.' Adding a comma after 'alder', they added (HRS, 295): 'Pomegranate Pills, Wallnut rinds and roots, Oaken Sapling Bark, and Saw-dust of the same; Crab-tree Bark, Galls, and Sumach.'

We close this section as it was started, with readings from the paper on the Pico Teneriffe. The criticism levelled by Coleridge at Sprat that in his Life of Cowley he suppressed homely detail and would not show his friend in his slippers and dressing-gown could well apply to the editors of his History too. From the end of the following: 'The rest of us pursued our Journey till we came to the Sugar-loaf, where we begin to travel again in a white sand, being fore-shod with shooes whose single soles are made a finger broader than the upper leather, to encounter this difficult and unstable passage' (HRS, 201) they expunged the vivid: '. . . till they are halfe way up; and then being ascended as farre as the Black Rocks, Dr Pugh (as he relates) went crying all the way having the skin burnt off his foot '(CP). Likewise 'Being ascended as far as the Black Rocks, which are all flat, & lie like a pavement, we climbed within a mile of the very top of the Pico, Mr Clappham, who was the foremost, would have persuaded Mr Cove to descend againe, as he was imagining the top all on fire' (ibid.).

(b). Errors: printers' literals, misreading of copy.

Section (a) has been demonstrative, seeking to show how a particular editorial policy was put into effect. The appeal of an editor printing the papers referred to can ultimately be only to CP, though he may record, and discuss possible reasons for, variants in the later texts.

Instances in which the transcribers for press have misunderstood technical terms or foreign words call for some little research in order to amend errors. Sometimes omissions in transcription have to be filled from the manuscripts, as in: '. . . boysterous, called Travant, come suddenly . . .' (HRS, 160; a further corruption in this passage was considered above). Here, however, it is possible to restore this particular corruption before consulting the manuscript, since the paper deals with the East Indies and a knowledge of Dutch simplifies our task: read, with CP and R: '. . . boysterous winds, called Travaat. . .' Again, '. . . A sort of wild Lavender . . . grows there [in Teneriffe] in great

quantities on the Rocks' (HRS, 211), where the HRS text follows R over 'wild': CP has 'white'. Sir Philiberto Vernatti, who answers the East Indies questions, was, in spite of his name, English. He speaks (HRS, 168), with reference to a glutinous substance, that it is of a 'Zeequal viscosity'. This is the Dutch 'zeekwal,' jellyfish. Assuming that the homophonic spelling was not the normal Dutch spelling of the period — I have been unable to document it otherwise — this variant may have occurred at some stage when the text was perhaps communicated orally; the same may, with some confidence, be said of 'sivyboa/ sawoeboom' (163, noted in the facsimile edition) and of 'cherna/ cierna' (Italian) on p.208. Several words in Spanish the compositor, in fact, misread:

The ambiguity of the last sentence cannot escape notice. In CP and R a seeming gloss of Legnan (Spanish, leñan, 'wood') which starts 'vel. . .' is erased, and the latter text omits 'and rank', intelligently substituting a semi-colon for the comma after 'of it'.

Other examples of variants in effective punctuation are few (see also (c) below), but we may note the following: 'This greasie Oyl. . . doth by nature so wonderfully adhere to every part else of the [salt-] Peter (it may be ordained for the nutriment and augmentation of it) that the separation of it is the sole cause of the great charge and labour that is required to the refining of Peter' (HRS, 262), where R, the only extant manuscript, inserts a comma after 'may be'; and 'Maxima, Satellitum in Umbra incidentium, a limbo Disci Jovialis distantia . . . hebdomada contingit' (185-186), where CP and R have no comma after 'incidentium'.

We conclude this section, several of whose items may, in interpretation, overlap with those of the next, with a few miscellaneous variants, such as HRS 'candescentibus' (262) for the true reading 'canescentibus' in a passage of Pliny; 'gravulate' for 'granulate' (272; perhaps a literal); 'The Ascension of the Brimstone' (205), which is contextually possible, as against the more tempting 'Accension' of R; 'It will require your patience to observe a few short remains' (262; R, 'remarks') 'out of the same Pliny,'; 'Each Boat hath a certain quantity of square Stones,

upon which Stones' (169; all MSS, 'stands') 'the Divers goe down'; 'English Woad is counted the strongest, it is commonly tryed by staining of white Paper with it, or a white Limed wall' (300; CP, 'lomed wall'); and, with reference to the paper on the eclipses of the moon mentioned above: 'The Knowledge of the Eclipses Quantity and Duration, the Shadows, Curvity and Inclination, &c. conduce only to the former [purpose, sc. the theory of the moon's motion]', where the true reading would appear to be 'the shadow [']s curvity' of the manuscripts. The remaining Latin variants, though important in their own right, are somewhat esoteric, and are therefore relegated to a footnote for reference.[11]

(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.

Notes