Microscopy and Natural Philosophy: Robert Hooke, His Micrographia, and the Early Royal Society

This contribution focuses on the graphic project Robert Hooke developed for the Royal Society in the mid-1660s, which resulted in his celebrated Micrographia, the illustrated volume of his microscopical investigations published at London in 1665. Hooke’s Micrographia stands out as the most notable example of the early Royal Society’s reformist project, notably for the role played by visual demonstration in explaining and divulging the new world unveiled by the microscope. The book was seen as a model of the Society’s experimentalism, and microscopical views of organic and inorganic bodies were presented as evidence of mechanisms operating at multiple levels in nature, though ultimately based on God’s power and wisdom. Hooke’s descriptions of his observations and the plates included in his Micrographia are relevant for understanding not only the cultural background in which the book was born and developed, but also the seventeenth-century debates over the theory of matter and the limits of purely mechanical explanations.