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Abstract Italy has often held a special place in the view of cultivated Englishmen, and this is especially the case for Italian sciences in the seventeenth century (1). At the first beginnings of the Royal Society in 1645 the young men who met for discussions in London held Italian science in high esteem. So much was this the case that among their topics of discussion, as John Wallis, by then Savilian Professor at Oxford, recalled in 1678, were the valves in the veins (whose description by Fabricius of Aquapendente had so impressed William Harvey), Galileo s telescopic discoveries and Torricelli s barometric experiment, all part of that ‘New Philosophy’ which he took to have been founded by Galileo and Bacon. This last was certainly the view to which most of the early Fellows of the Royal Society subscribed, paying constant tribute to Galileo’s role in the foundation of the new experimental science as well as in the advancement of the Copernican theory, as can be seen from the works of Robert Boyle and, later, Newton. The chronological point, self-evident but not always remembered, that living men are not constrained by dates, although historians may wish to be, is exemplified in the case of Newton’s respect for Galileo enunciated in 1687 in the first edition of the Principia, maintained through all the vicissitudes of revision in 1713 and 1723, and as long as the Principia was read, as it was throughout the seventy-five years after Newton’s death (1727), his 1687 tribute to Galileo remained fresh. Similarly, the works of post-Galilean Italian scientists by no means lost their influence because time had worn on into the eighteenth century and they had published in the seventeenth; even today a fifty-year-old book in a new edition may excite new readers, and this of course was even more true in the past when scientific advances approximated in their rate of development to those of, say, economics or psychology today.
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