Boyle's method of work: Promoting his corpuscular philosophy

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Abstract
HOW do scientists work ? This is an intriguing question, never easy to resolve satisfactorily, especially as they themselves are unreliable witnesses. With contemporaries one can try to unravel their thread of argument from many sources: from what they remember (or profess to remember), from notebooks, correspondence, the testimony of collaborators and friends. For the past the situation is necessarily worse; not only is there a paucity of manuscript evidence but, worse, scientists did not, for the most part, think of such things as being of interest to readers. Even for Newton, one of the most self-conscious of workers, whose compulsion to preserve written materials has resulted in the survival of a truly enormous mass of papers, the evidence is sketchy; and for others, especially before the 19th century, the situation is more difficult. It is, however, often possible to hazard plausible reconstructions, and this is particularly the case with Robert Boyle, for there is a collection of his surviving manuscripts in the Royal Society (Boyle Papers), and these papers, with the hints that he and his ‘publishers’ (editors) left in the prefaces to his printed works, offer possibilities for discovering his methods of work in some detail and his over-all plan for his life-work.

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