MONSTROUS HEAD: This profile of a deformed colt accompanied a paper, published on July 3, 1665, in Philosophical Transactions, describing Boyle’s use of ethyl alcohol to preserve the head, which Boyle had “hastily and rudely cut off” for further study. PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS (1665-1678)
On March 6, 1665, Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the fledgling Royal Society of London, published the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London—now the longest-running scholarly journal dedicated to science. Oldenburg selected the material for the journal from the voluminous correspondence addressed to him by members of the Royal Society, founded 5 years earlier, and often summarized the material himself. Among Oldenburg’s frequent correspondents was the highly esteemed “noble philosopher” Robert Boyle. Although the Anglo-Irish scientist is best known for Boyle’s Law of gases, his first contribution to Philosophical Transactions was actually Oldenburg’s summary of Boyle’s second-hand account of a deformed calf fetus discovered in Hampshire in southern England. Boyle’s writing appears often in Oldenburg’s issues of the journal: from ...
