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Title: Thomas Burnet - frontispiece to Sacred Theory of the Earth
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1684
Description: Thomas Burnet was master of Clare Hall, Cambridge, chaplain to King William, and master of Charterhouse. He was also a contemporary of Isaac Newton, who studied Burnet’s works very closely. His Sacred Theory was composed as “an apology for and exposition of the idea of Providence in an age increasingly dominated by mechanism and scepticism.” It proposed that with respect to the most important biblical events - notably Creation, the Flood, and final conflagration - scripture and mechanical philosophy could be reconciled. Burnet also insisted that the colossal scale of Providential superintendence was appropriate to the degradation of mankind’s moral virtue.

Title: Thomas Burnet - fig 3 to Sacred Theory of the Earth
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1684
Description: Burnet’s “general idea” of the primeval Earth: “Because it pleaseth more, and makes a greater impression on us, to see things represented to the Eye, than to read their description in words, we have ventur’d to give a model of the Primaeval Earth, with its Zones or greater Climates, and the general order and tracts of its Rivers ...”

Title: Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1684
Description: Portrait from volume two of his four-volume Werken, published in 1689. Leeuwenhoek was the son of a middle-class shopkeeper in Delft, Netherlands. He began his professional life as a cloth merchant and then served in several civil service posts in Delft. As the Court Surveyor of Holland, he acquired an interest in lens grinding and fashioned his first microscope in 1671. He communicated his observations to other scientific practitioners in letters written in Dutch that were later collected together and published in four volumes