Bacon, Boyle, and the writing of natural history

This article examines the rules for writing and presenting natural history according to Robert Boyle, with a view to showing how Bacon’s principles were both followed and revised in the late seventeenth century. The article first focuses on the way of writing experiments and observations, the description of which constitutes the main material of a natural history. The composition of books of natural history is then examined in its methodological, heuristic, and programmatic dimensions. Finally, the article inquires into the principle of collaboration in natural history and the way it is rendered in the writing and presentation of the texts here studied.