Robert Hooke and his Contemporaries

Abstract

IN his account of the extraordinarily intriguing, human and intimate part of the ” Diary of Robert Hooke”, published in NATURE of September 7, Prof. Andrade has suggested that the biographer, Richard Waller, ” apparently had little personal knowledge of Hooke or his intimates”. This may have been the case during the earlier period before 1680, but entries in the later Diaries, which I have recently transcribed and printed, show that Waller and Hooke were fellow members of a coffee-house coterie, that met almost daily at Jonathan's. It was the habit of Hooke to abbreviate the names of his friends, and many were the talks and walks in which Hooke mentions the companionship of ” Lod”, ” Cur”, or ” Wall”, either into the country or to attend book-auctions held in the vicinity. That no official portrait of Hooke was painted for the Royal Society, and that no obituary notice appeared of him in the Philosophical Transactions, may be ascribed to the fact that his death was immediately followed by the election of Newton to the presidential chair, and Newton is known to have been unfavourably inclined towards Hooke. The neglect was in part remedied when Waller printed the ” Posthumous Works” of Robert Hooke in 1705.