Abstract
“SIR, you will please to remember that we have taken to taske the whole Vniverse, and that we were obliged to doe so by the nature of our Dessein. It will therefore be requisite that we purchase and entertain a commerce in all parts of ye world wth the most philosophicall and curious persons, to be found everywhere.” So writes Henry Oldenburg to Governor Winthrop of Connecticut on October 13, 1667. And in these words he briefly expresses what was the chief aim of the best years of his life. It was mainly by his immense correspondence that Oldenburg forwarded the cause of science, or, as it was then called, of the “new experimentall learning,”by that and by his assiduous discharge of secretarial and editorial work. Without being a man of brilliant genius, he was just such an intelligent, reliable, energetic, and conscientious worker as was needed at that time to form a centre for the new movement. In the history of literature Henry Oldenburg is a familiar figure as the friend and correspondent of Milton; in the history of philosophy, as the friend and correspondent of Spinoza; but neither literature nor philosophy is indebted to him to the same extent as science.
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References
Scott B. Wilson, assisted by A. H. Evans . "Aves Hawaienses: the Birds of the Sandwich Islands." Parts iii. iv. 410. (London: R. W. Porter, 1892, 1893).
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RIX, H. Henry Oldenburg, First Secretary of the Royal Society. Nature 49, 9–12 (1893). https://doi.org/10.1038/049009a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/049009a0