| Popis: |
This essay focusses upon two keepers of the Ashmolean Museum that were important to promoting natural philosophy, and promoting it well in Oxford in the unloved eighteenth century: John Whiteside (1679–1729) and William Huddesford (1732–1772). Whiteside, elected keeper on 14 December 1714, was a member of Christ Church and clergyman, a keen and talented astronomer, an FRS, and Edmond Halley communicated two of his astronomical observations to the Royal Society. Huddesford was also not only a significant natural historian, but an antiquary whom we have to thank for preserving the early modern archives in the natural sciences. An analysis of the work of Whiteside and Huddesford demonstrates that we need to think more about Georgian keepers of the Ashmolean as proper natural philosophers and antiquaries beyond the usual narratives of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, which premise an eighteenth-century decline. This chapter also analyses the significant interconnections between antiquarianism and early modern natural philosophy which were often part of the same intellectual endeavour. |
