Establishing the new science: the experience of the early Royal Society

who used this, his only book not only to condemn suicide but also to emphasize how the godly life could help one to avoid it. Sym dealt with "difficult" conundrums such as, does the man condemned to death unjustly cooperate willingly with the executioner? (The answer was, yes, again illustrating the Puritans' deep conservatism.) Sym also discussed at length such psychological states as melancholy, which he noted were, like suicide, very widespread and also the temptations of and possession by the devil, that lead to suicide. Sym's book will appeal to psychologists and historians of psychology (which is the aim of reprinting it in this series), but it will also interest general historians for its explication of a way of thinking that disappeared in the light of Enlightenment reason. Additionally, the work is greatly enhanced by Michael MacDonald's excellent introduction, which sets the context both for the history of suicide in general, and Sym's work in particular. This collection of nine essays (four of which have not previously been published) surveys the institutional career of the Royal Society from its founding to the early eighteenth century. It is good to have this material in book form. Only now can one properly appreciate Dr Hunter's immense industry in burrowing through the papers of the Society and its leading figures. New essays include a confident guide through the legal and proprietary maze of Sir John Cutler's endowment, a cautious analysis of the allegedly official status of Thomas Sprat's History, and a meticulous survey of the functions of committees in the early Royal Society. The highlights of already printed materials are studies of the Society's abortive plans for purpose-built quarters (written with P. B. Wood) and patterns of patronage in the support of Nehemiah Grew's botanical work. No one knows more about the institutional history of Restoration science than Dr Hunter. From tracing the vagaries of testamentary law in connection with the Cutler affair to sorting out the exact number and provenance of stuffed humming-birds in the Society's Repository, Hunter is a master of his material. Indeed, detail and particularities are the key to Hunter's view of the Royal Society. The Society, he warns, "has already suffered greatly from over-schematized views of its origins and nature. It is essential that in studying institutions we do justice to their full historical complexity" (p. 353; cf. p. 41). Where other historians have allegedly erred in …