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Published online 28 March 2006 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news060327-9
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Eleventh-hour deal keeps scientific treasure in Britain
Royal Society buys historic manuscript minutes before it was to go for auction.
Britain's Royal Society has won a last-ditch battle to regain possession of one of its most valuable treasures, a seventeenth-century manuscript handwritten by the physicist Robert Hooke, which the society claims was taken from its archives some 300 years ago.
The document, which contains Hooke's minutes of Royal Society meetings from 1661 to 1682, was discovered in a private house last year and was due to be sold at Bonhams auction house in London today.
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