The Prae-Adamitae and the early Royal Society: Two Cases from the

Periphery

William Poole (New College, Oxford)

(Paper delivered at ‘Biblical Exegesis and the Emergence of Science in the Early-Modern Era’,
Birkbeck, November 2004.)

1.
Late in 1675, Robert Hooke, dissatisfied with his Royal Society employers,
decided to form a splinter club, this time meeting not in Gresham College, but in the
coffee-shop. On Friday 10 December, Hooke and company “[a]greed upon new clubb
to meet at Joes. Mr. Hill, Mr. Lodowick, Mr. Aubrey and I and to joyn to us Sir Jo:
More, Mr. Wild, Mr. Hoskins, to begin tomorrow night at 7.”1 This initial “clubb” did
not fare very well, as Hooke felt the need to re-establish it with a slightly reshuffled
membership on New Year’s Eve. But the three-week club did meet a few times, and
one snippet of a recorded meeting is the prompt for my paper today:

[Saturday 18 December:] To Martins and Garaways club: Ludowick, Hill,

Aubery, Wild. Discoursd about Universal Character, about preadamits and of
Creation. About Insects. I mentioned all vegetables to be femals. I told Wild
and Aubery of flying. Wild cold. Drank port.

“[A]bout preadamits and of Creation”: now Hooke is laconically referring to one of

the greatest of seventeenth-century theological scandals – the Prae-Adamitae of the
French millenarian Isaac La Peyrère, published in 1655, but of which the first book
had been circulating since the early 1640s. Despite continental injunctions and
combustions, and the attempted banning of the English translation of 1656, the Prae-
Adamitae, which argued that men had existed long before Adam, had no trouble
circulating throughout England and Scotland in both its Dutch and London printings.2
In this paper I survey two rather different figures in the early RS with interests
in the Prae-Adamitae: first, Francis Willughby, the taxonomer and collaborator of
John Ray; and secondly, Francis Lodwick, merchant, administrator, and linguist, the
very “Ludowick” above who was discussing the preadamites with Hooke in the
1
Hooke’s diaries are cited from Robert Hooke, The Diary of Robert Hooke M.A., M.D., F.R.S. 1672-
1680, ed. H. W. Robinson and W. Adams, (London: Taylor and Francis, 1935), cited by date alone.
Hooke’s later diaries are transcribed in vol. 7 of R. T. Gunther, ed., Early Science in Oxford. 15 vols.
(Oxford: privately printed, 1923-1967).
2
For details, see William Poole, “English Preadamism and an Anonymous English Preadamist,” The
Seventeenth Century 19 (2004): 1-35. Three examples of circulation, not noted in my earlier article,
will suffice: the book is listed in the sale catalogue of the first English library to be publicly auctioned,
that of the Presbyterian Lazarus Seaman; interestingly, it is there listed in the subsection Libri Socinii et
Anti-Socinii and not in the adjacent theological or philological quartos (Catalogus variorum &
insignium librorum instructissimae bibliothecae clarissimi doctissimique viri Lazari Seaman, S.T.D.
[London: Edward Brewster and William Cooper, 1676], 32). Secondly, the book is listed once in Latin
and twice in English in the sale catalogue of the Hartlibean Benjamin Worsley (Catalogus Librarum ...
Benjaminis Worsley [London: John Dunmore and Richard Chiswell, 1678], 14 [Latin section], 38
[English section]). Finally, the book appears in the library of the Edinburgh medic Andrew Balfour,
one of a small number of theological books in an otherwise massive, predominantly medical, library. It
appeared there alongside other controversial works, including Vossius’ De Septuaginta Interpretibus,
and the Racovian Catechism (Bibliotheca Balfouriana [Edinburgh: the heirs and successors of Andrew
Anderson, 1695], 39, 42).

1
closing weeks of 1675. My sources will be primarily manuscript, as befits a
clandestine venture.

2. Willughby
Francis Willughby’s papers now reside in the Middleton papers in Nottingham
University Library, where can be found many of his and John Ray’s illustrations of
birds, animals, and fish, as well as some herb specimens. The collection also includes
Willughby’s commonplace book, a large volume in use certainly in the 1650s and
1660s.3 It contains records of various dated alchemical experiments, as well as mass
of historical, political, and philosophical material (such as the shrewd observation
“Augustins Argument to prove our own beeing very like Cartesius”).4 But the pages
of interest to us come at the end of the commonplace book, comprising an abstract of
the Prae-Adamitae keyed by page-numbers to the original (Latin) text.5 Willughby
did not disperse its contents throughout his commonplace book among certain
preorganised headings, as he did with much of his other reading, and his compacted
notes suggest an intensive, perhaps even one-sitting reading. It seems reasonable to
date these notes to the late 1650s or early 1660s, although it’s unlikely that Willughby
read the work during his well-known visit to the Bodleian in late 1660, because
Hyde’s 1675 Bodleian catalogue does not include the work,6 whereas Willughby’s
own manuscript library catalogue does.7 This was a book Willughby too owned.
Beyond the fact that it is there at all, the digest itself cannot tell us very much,
other than that Willughby read the entire work through with some care, and abstracted
from it “Praecipua Argumenta” or “principal arguments,” noting all the theses for
which La Peyrère remains notorious: the accommodation of pagan historical records;
the origin of sin from matter and not from some primeval human action; the querying
or at least restriction of Mosaic authorship; the construction of scripture from different
autograph (autographis) and even non-autograph (apographis) documents; the
resultant corruption, transposita & mutilata, of much of the final text; and, finally, the
restriction of the miracle of the flood to local cataclysm, and the likelihood that all

3
Descriptions of this collection can be found an Access to Archives (www.a2a.org.uk). My thanks to
David Cram and Dorothy Johnston for guidance with this collection.
4
NUL MS Middleton LM 15, p. 126 (following the original inked pagination).
5
NUL MS Middleton LM 15, pp. 557-59.
6
A scribal copy of Wood’s laudatory notice of Willughby in the Fasti (ii.246-247), where Willughby’s
visit to the Bodleian is noted, is itself to be found in the Middleton collection among the loose papers
ancillary to the commonplace book, many of which were originally pinned into it. Despite the presence
today in the Bodleian of seven copies of the Latin text of the Prae-Adamitae (and two copies of the
English translation), many from later bequests, Hyde’s 1674 Catalogus Impressorum Librorum
Bibliothecae Bodleianae does not appear to list the work (no entry under ‘La Peyrère’, ‘Peyrerius’, or
‘Praeadamitae’) which was therefore almost certainly not present in the Bodleian before this date.
7
NUL Mi I 17, fol. 24r (book no. 73, on Shelf 5, Bay T): “Praeadamitae.” The catalogue of the
Willughby library is extant (NUL MS Mi I 17), but it is extremely badly damaged, and represents the
contents of a library started in the sixteenth century and continued after Francis the naturalist’s death.
The manuscript was probably drawn up at the request of Thomas Willughby some time after 1691-2,
when he inhertited and amalgamated the Wollaton and Middleton libraries. See Alice T. Friedman,
House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 29-33. The MS itself comprises a shelf-list followed by an A-Z;
much of the first section is missing, and where comparison between the two lists is possible, it is
apparent that they do not overlap exactly. Page-headings in the first section show that the shelves or
bays were lettered from A to at least T (where the extant shelf-list stops), and that each letter governed
around 100 books on average. Thus the library represented by the shelf-list was at least 1,900 volumes
strong (counting I/J as one letter). There is a 1925 Christies sale catalogue for the library as it then
stood, by which time it had shrunk to 756 volumes.

2
regions have their own deluges. As an abstractor, Willughby does not deny these
arguments, nor does he affirm them.
Willughby, we know from Joseph Glanvill’s dedication to him of the latter’s
Lux Orientalis, was interested in theologically recondite material. As Glanvill
tactfully said of his wonted patron:

Not that I would suggest, that you are a Favourer of any strange opinions, or
hold any thing in this particular, or any other, that is fit to be discountenanc’d.
But I know you love to be dealing in high and generous Theories, even where
your self are a dissenter.8

Are there “high and generous Theories” witnessed elsewhere in Willughby’s

papers? Willughby also used his commonplace book as a document wallet for stray
jottings, and one such item, originally pinned to a page otherwise unassociated with
the insert, presents what it terms ‘Objections against the Scripture.’ And, remarkably,
this document offers precisely that. In four numbered sections, Willughby lists
objections to the Old Testament: the improbably huge number of people the post-
diluvian families managed to generate; the commands given to the Israelites that
“seeme contrarie to morall Honestie”; over-cruel punishments; and the problem of
polygamy. An appendix notes that there are fewer exceptions against the New
Testament, and Henry More’s Mystery of Godliness is cited to clear these up.
I attribute the authorship of this document to Willughby. In physical layout, it
is not neat enough to be a transcript of something else, and the use of More to buttress
the New Testament again suggests that Willughby first set down the objections and
then set down solutions known to him from his own reading; and Willughby does cite
that precise work of More on a number of occasions elsewhere in his papers.9
I want to dwell only on one section of this document, the second one, in which
are listed Old Testament actions contrary to moral honesty. Now many of these were
well-known problems, as a glance in any commentary will show, but what is
remarkable about Willughby is that they appear to remain objections, and do not trail
the elaborate solutions offered by the commentators. One example will suffice, the
most notorious of the objections Willughby gathers: the lie that Jacob tells his old,
blind father Isaac, when he claims that he is Esau, and fraudulently receives his
father’s blessing.
Let us take as a point of comparison the approach to this episode adopted by
the influential biblical commentator Alfonsus Tostatus, the fifteenth-century Bishop
of Avila and bedrock of most succeeding commentary. According to Tostatus, we
must here distinguish three types of fraus or fraud:

1. fraus eruditionis, or instructive deception, whereby a teacher deceives with

sophistical arguments so that a pupil may learn to detect such mendacity when
he next encounters it. His biblical example is Jacob’s putting the cup into

8
Joseph Glanvill, Lux Orientalis, or an Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages, concerning the
Praeexistemce of Souls (London: n.p., 1662), sg. A3v.
9
John Ray certainly knew More, and Willughby may have met him too; he at least wrote to More,
although the letter is no longer extant. Willughby cited More’s Grand Mystery on astrology in The
Book of Sports (Cram, Forgeng, Johnston, Francis Willughy’s Book of Sports, 9-10, 96 [citing book vii.
ch. 15], 317); and the commonplace book also records readings of the book (124, 338; see Cram et al
96). The inserts also demonstrate that Willughby was reading More’s Conjectura Cabbalistica (insert
10c). These were most likely read in More’s Collected Works (listed at MS Mi I 17, fol. 5r; MS Mi 15,
insert 34 cites from “Dr mores Preface to his works”).

3
 Benjamin’s sack – Jacob was not being nasty, he was trying to educate his
brothers to virtue.
2. fraus divinae spirationis, or deception by divine inspiration. The biblical
example Tostatus gives is of God commanding the Israelites to rob the
Egyptians – note Willughby’s listing of the same place.
3. fraus noxiae deceptionis. This is when someone says that they are doing good,
but are actually doing evil.10

Tostatus excuses the first two classes, declaring only the final fraus to be peccatum,
sin. Jacob’s lie to his father, on this taxonomy, is, as Tostatus unsurprisingly argues,
an example of fraus divinae spirationis, as Rebbekah, encouraging her son to the
deceit, was under divine instruction.
The contrast with Willughby is obvious. For Tostatus, God ordered it and so
there is no dishonesty; for Willughby, it is dishonest, so why did God order it? To
some extent, Willughby was not a voice in the wilderness: as the Jesuit Jacobus
Bonfrerius (1573-1642) had judged of the passage, “whence we should not always be
accustomed to excuse everything done by the saints, since it is certain that even they
did not live without sin.”11 And the popular English vernacular compiler Andrew
Willet (1562-1621) could judge simply, “Wherefore the best solution of the question
is, that Iacob told an officious lie to his father.”12 What makes Willughby important is
that he abstracted such moments and queried why they had been commanded. Any
moment of potential subversion in a commentary of the bulk of Tostatus – the edition
I consulted weighs slightly less than I do – is lost in that inherently pious of genres,
the seriatim commentary. Conversely, Willughby’s single sheet collects and distils.
I am not arguing that there is a genetic connection between Willughby’s
reading of La Peyrère and his own ‘Objections’. But Willughby was interested in
unconventional theological work, and in formulating his own responses. One
subtending connection we might make between La Peyrère and Willughby is
Socinianism: the indebtedness of La Peyrère to Socinian thought has long been
recognised, and Willughby’s sober moral judgement on the shaky moments in the Old
Testament as opposed to the New is a potentially Socinian move.13 But there is a
difference. The Racovian Catechism, for instance, underplayed the importance of the
Old Testament, but in no sense attacked its “certainty.” 14 Likewise, La Peyrère’s
observations concerned the text of the Old Testament, not its moral status. As Noel
Malcolm has pointed out, such doubts were by no means new in the 1650s, and had an
10
Alfonsus Tostatus, Opera Omnia, 29 vols. in 13 (Venice, 1596), vol. 1, f.p. 308r.
11
Matthew Poole, Synopsis Criticorum Aliorumque S. Scripturae Interpretum (London, Cornelius Bee,
1669), ad loc.
12
Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Genesin (London, 1605), 292. Willet notes that the “best” of both
Protestant and Catholic authors agree in this, but erroneously includes Tostatus in his list.
13
The shelf-list does contain two Socinian polemics by Jonasz Szlichting, but these works are nothing
like the ‘Objections’ (NUL MS Mi I 17, fols. 20r, 21r). The works are: Jonas Schlichtingius, De SS
Trinitate (s.l.: s.n., 1637) and Questiones Duae (Racov: s.n., 1636). These do not appear in the A-Z;
nor does the Prae-Adamitae. By the time (part of) the Wollaton library came up for auction in 1925,
there was no trace of these books. See Catalogue of Valuable Books selected from the Library at
Wollaton Hall, Nottingham the property of the Rt. Hon. Lord Middleton[…] which will be sold by
auction by Messrs. Christie, Manson & Woods […] on Monday, June 15, 1925 ([London]: [Christie et
al], 1925).
14
The Racovian Catechisme (‘Amsterdam’: ‘Brooer Janz’, 1652), 3-4. In the chapter ‘Touching the
Certainty of the Holy Scriptures’, the Racovian Catechism states that the New Testament is textually
stable, except “in some things of slight moment.” The Old Testament, conversely, is given only one
paragraph, in which it is called “certain” only because the New Testament says so. There is a definite
hierarchy, but an understated one. Scripture is not infallible, but only fails in unimportant areas.

4
orthodox pedigree extending back into Catholic commentary, including Tostatus.15
And the textual criticism of Richard Simon was certainly giving men like Locke and
Newton the confidence to develop their own ideas on the composition of the Bible.16
But what made such observations dangerous in the age of Willughby was that they
now functioned as interventions, components deployed by and nourishing larger and
more obviously subversive projects.
Willughby, in faulting the morality of the biblical text, had potentially bigger
game in sight. What he thought his objections cumulatively suggested, we cannot
exactly know. But the implications of his second set of objections are profound:
Willughby grouped them together not as instances of human fraus, but, in his phrase,
of fraudulent “things commanded.” It’s not that these are deceptions, finally, that
bothers Willughby; after all, the Old Testament is full of them. What is worrying
about the “severall things commanded” is that God commanded them.

3. Lodwick
I have been careful not to overstate the connection between La Peyrère and
Willughby. Francis Lodwick, however, is a different case. Lodwick was an
unassuming fellow, leaving not many traces in the records of the time. A prosperous
London merchant of Flemish-French extraction, he appears now and then in the
Hartlib papers, and is best known today for his work on language reform. He
published the first English scheme for some kind of universal character (A Common
Writing [1647], followed by the more refined but still explicitly preliminary Ground-
work or Foundation Laid for the Framing of a New Perfect Language [1652]), and
later in the century he moved into the circle of Hooke, in whose diaries we earlier
encountered him. Through this circle Lodwick gained access and election to the Royal
Society in 1681, whom he served diligently as a trusted administrator and occasional
Council member.
All the while Lodwick was keeping a lowish but interested profile in the Royal
Society, he was collecting books for his vast private library, and he was writing down
various short tracts on matters that interested him. Language reform, of course, but
also issues concerning the origin of the world, the status of scripture, and the thesis
that there were men before Adam.
Lodwick, like Willughby, owned the Prae-Adamitae, this time in both Latin
and English. Unlike Willughby, Lodwick’s papers unquestionably show that he
assented to all La Peyrère’s central hypotheses enumerated above. He opens one of
his collections of theological disquisitions – this of 35 short numbered chapters – with
a discussion “Concerning the Originall of Mankind.” And as Lodwick argues, there
were indeed men before Adam, and to the general system of La Peyrère he brings his
own speciality: linguistic research. As far as Lodwick was concerned, the ineluctable
plurality of languages could not be traced to a single original tongue. In the same
manuscript, Lodwick also composed a relatively crude utopia called A Country Not
Named, in which his own pre-Adamite beliefs were transposed into the mouths of an
actual pre-Adamite nation, who resembled an amalgam of Hartlibean, records-
obsessed social reformers, and a very Jewish-looking, but historically and genetically
pre-Jewish kingdom, who had suffered a flood thousands of years before the creation

15
Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 383-431.
16
J. A. I. Champion, “‘Acceptable to inquisitive men’: Some Simonian Contexts for Newton’s Biblical
Criticism, 1680-1692,” in Newton and Religion, ed. J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1999). See also Scott Mandelbrote, “‘A duty of the greatest moment’: Isaac Newton and the writing of
biblical criticism,” BJHS 26 (1993): 281-302.

5
was conventionally held to have taken place, and who now all lived in harmony with
one religion and one tongue. Finally, in a set of papers which passed into his friend
Abraham Hill’s manuscripts, Lodwick developed a cosmogony in which he attempted
to fuse a Cartesian, vortical model of cosmogenesis with a pre-Adamite, even
Lucretian account of the origin of man, all carried out with scrupulous if not entirely
convincing attention to the sequence of the biblical hexameron.17 This Lodwick
followed with an again unconventional exegesis of the narrative of the fall and
expulsion, a narrative for Lodwick taking place many thousands of years after the
events recorded obscurely in Genesis 1. Here, for a taste, is how Lodwick opens his
cosmogony:

God firstly Created that universal mas of matter out of which succeedingly all
those great globes the sun the planets and all the other stars were produced
which universal mas of matter was without form and motion, In this universal
mas of matter God Caused a Coagulation into parts more dense & into Bodies
Globuler and the remainder was a substance most rare and fluid and
Circulating all those globes and in which they were to mooue in their order
designed and at fit distances the one from the other which substance rare and
fluid was named æther these Globes of Substance Coagulate God aggregated
into aggregates of globes divers in each of which aggregates God fitted one of
these globes for a Center of motion to all the other globes of the same
aggregate about which they were to movue [sic] Circularly and to be heated
and lighted by the same this is spoken of the Stars in Generall, next shall be
related the manner <supposed> how God succedingly perfected the Globes of
our aggregat and by the same we may Conceiue how God perfected those
Globes of the other aggregates. (Sloane 2903, fol. 158r)

Lodwick is theistic. His cosmogony explicitly invokes the Deity not as some distant
First Cause, but as an active moulder of the physical reality He creates in time.
Lodwick is also biblical: his phraseology checks in with the Mosaic account whenever
it can. In short, Lodwick extrapolates rather than contests the hexameron.
Lodwick’s general acceptance of the thesis that there were men before Adam
and the interest evidenced elsewhere in his papers in philosemitism speak loud and
clear the controlling influence of La Peyrère. But Lodwick is no slavish disciple, and
indeed I contend that he is a more interesting figure. First, in however amateur a
fashion, Lodwick is interested in integrating La Peyrère’s views into contemporary
ideas of cosmogony, Cartesian at base. La Peyrère was not involved in natural
philosophy – and not really involved in biblical scholarship either. As Grafton nicely
put it, “As a scholar he was dwarfed by the great erudite dinosaurs of his time, though
he did filch vital factoids from them.”18 But Lodwick also brought to the pre-Adamite
hypothesis a much stronger Socinian accent. La Peyrère retained many conventional
theological ideas. He didn’t have much to say explicitly about or against the Trinity

17
For a fuller analysis of these texts, see William Poole, “A Rare Early-Modern Utopia: Francis
Lodwick’s A Country Not Named (c. 1675),” Utopian Studies 15 (2004): 115-37; idem, “The Genesis
Narrative in the Circle of Robert Hooke and Francis Lodwick,” Scripture and Scholarship in Early
Modern England, ed. A. Hessayon and N. Keene (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, forthcoming); idem,
“Francis Lodwick’s Creation: Theology and Natural Philosophy in the Early Royal Society,” Journal
of the History of Ideas, forthcoming.
18
Anthony Grafton, “Isaac La Peyrère and the Old Testament” in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions
of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991), 204-13, here
211.

6
(although his work has damaging implications for that doctrine), and he retained
original sin as an important component of his system. Lodwick, in distinction,
rejected the notions of both the Trinity and of original sin, and many of his
manuscripts praise Reason as the ultimate arbiter in man. So much so, indeed, that to
be a Christian in Lodwick’s eyes, in merely to follow the doctrine of Christ, and as
that is identical to what Reason teaches, then one need never have heard of Christ in
order to live virtuously, and to be saved. Christianity is as old as the creation, for
Lodwick, who cannot have known the work of that title, as he was dead 36 years
before Tindal’s book was published.
Lodwick’s library catalogue demonstrates that he, like so many others both
orthodox and unorthodox, owned various Socinian works. But Lodwick is not a
scholarly Socinian. Reading his manuscripts shows:

1. the lack of any external authorities cited for his opinions

2. the denial of the trinity
3. the denial of original sin
4. textual suspicion of biblical integrity
5. the affirmation that adiaphora are all ‘hard places’, and not to be worried
about.

These are hallmarks of Socinianism, though the more complex Socinian arguments –
such as the denial that God knows future contingents – are not to be found in his
writings. Lodwick was a fervent if private Preadamite and Socinian, but not because
he researched deeply into the learned disputes on these subjects. Indeed, although I
am confident he read in English, Dutch, and probably French and Latin, his writings
are antischolarly, experimental first-person discourses, uninterested in (and potentially
unaware of) scholarly authority and precedent.

We started by citing an instance in Hooke’s diary in which Preadamism was

discussed. Are we then to conclude that such discussion was typical in the early Royal
Society, and that Lodwick spoke openly and unguardedly (though not in official
meetings) about his theories on the bible and creation. I suspect not. There is no
evidence Lodwick disseminated his writings, and the crucial aspect of what kind of
assent people were willing to vocalise is just not something we know much about.
What we do have are various commonplace books and catalogues, and these at least
demonstrate that La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae pops up everywhere. Ray, Pepys,
Halley, Locke – many others – all owned the book. Abraham Hill, the Society’s
treasurer and daily companion of Hooke and Lodwick, excerpted in his commonplace
books from La Peyrère, Simon, and Spinosa, all on the status of scripture. Today we
have seen that Francis Lodwick owned, read, and agreed, whereas Francis Willughby
read La Peyrère carefully, though we can’t say much more than that. In Glanvill’s
well-chosen phrase, these men were certainly dealing in high and generous theories.

4. Conclusions.
The only book of his in the Royal Society library is the 1647 Relation du
Groenland, signed on the fly-leaf by Henry Oldenburg, the copy Boyle presented to
the Royal Society in 1664; this should remind us that La Peyrère was also known, and
more happily assented to, as the period’s geographical authority on Iceland and

7
Greenland.19 But the significance of La Peyrère for the Royal Society fellows is, I
have demonstrated, wider than this. I want, therefore, to end with six statements:

1. Some men of science were interested in heretical material. But then, who was
not?
2. Some men of science assented to, or wrote down heretical material. This is
more important, though certainly not hitherto unknown.
3. This material derived much of its substance from elements variously traceable
to Socinianism, to La Peyrère, and to the biblical criticism of Richard Simon.
4. Such a situation contrasts with the apologetic ideal of the Royal Society that
its designated work as a society strengthened the claims of the established
church, even though the Society had vowed not to discuss theological matters
in their meetings.
5. But rather than seeing merely a stark discontinuity between the apologetics of,
say, Thomas Sprat, and the private heresies of Francis Lodwick, we could
rephrase these tensions in terms of varying spheres of publicity and privacy, as
well as the more obvious social considerations regarding the open propagation
of such work.
6. More specifically, the Hooke circle – notably Hooke himself, but also John
Aubrey, John Beaumont, and now Francis Lodwick – were developing
geological theories at this time with consequences for the age of the earth that
threatened either to push back the Mosaic reckoning, or to ignore it altogether.
It is usually said that the impetus for such theorising derived from the work of
Thomas Burnet, whose Sacred Theory of the Earth had not worn the “Sacred”
component of its title lightly. But there is no reason to doubt that the milieu in
which Hooke developed his radical geological theories was familiar with
similar arguments that had been earlier mooted – but in texts participating
more in the genre of theological, than of natural philosophical, speculation –
though rarely, of course, did one operate to the absolute exclusion of the other.

19
Royal Society Library, RCN 47444.