When the Royal Society was founded in 1662, they wisely chose Hooke, still only twenty-seven, for the novel post of Curator of Experiments, assigned to try the experiments suggested by members. “The truth is”—Hooke in his Micrographia (1665) sounded the keynote of the new age—“the science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the brain and the fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of observations on material and obvious things.”
