LITMIR.BIZ

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over thirty years’ work went missing on the road from Essex to London. Ray responded in haste:

      Sir, Your Letter dated Novemb. 12 came not to my hands till this day noon. Had you sent it by Post I had received it last Friday. Upon reading of it, finding that you had <not> received your Manuscripts I was much surprised & startled. I sent them inscribed according to your Directions this day fortnight, & inclosed therein an open Letter to you. Such an Accident as this never yet befell me, & ’tis too soon now. The Carrier is now gone up to London, so that I cannot examine him about it…. If it be not casually drop’t out of the wagon, I doubt not but we shall retrieve it. The losse of it would be inestimable.⁵⁰

      Although Ray was correct that the manuscripts had simply been delayed rather than lost, both Ray and Aubrey were deeply alarmed. The two books Aubrey lent to Ray were unique and irreplaceable manuscript texts containing annotations, drawings, and botanical samples not included in the only other extant copy, an autograph copy that Aubrey deposited in the library of the Royal Society in 1691.⁵¹

      Naturalists and antiquaries were occasionally cheated by their carriers. The most common stratagem was to claim upon delivery that the recipient needed to pay more postage even though the sender had paid the posted fee. Aubrey opened a 1679 letter to Wood with a screed against a lying carrier: “I recd your welcome ltr of Dec. 23. and this day the pacquet. but the Carrier is a knave. the carriage that you payd for was blotted-out and 4d more was inserted for me to pay. I grudge not the money, for the gladness of the ltr; but am vex’t at the abuse.”⁵² Aubrey, though vexed, had little choice but to pay the four pence if he wanted to receive his letter.

      Another problem that sometimes cropped up was a lack of local knowledge on the part of a carrier. When a carrier did not know the addressee of a package, he would hold on to it until someone came to pick it up. Edward Lhuyd at times ran into this problem in Oxford: packages addressed solely to him sometimes failed to arrive. He wrote to John Aubrey, “for the generality of the people at Oxford doe not yet know, what the Musaeum is; for they call the whole Buylding the Labradary <or Knackatory> & distinguish no farther. That nothing miscarried soe directed to Dr Plot was because the person was known better than the place, but things directed to me or Mr Higgins commonly stay’d at the carriers till we fetch’d them.”⁵³ In this instance, the carrier’s knowledge was more personal than institutional: he knew Plot, the old keeper, well enough but not Lhuyd or where to send a package addressed to the museum. So that a recipient would know to look out for a delivery, naturalists usually sent word by post when a package was on its way. Correspondents hoped that carriers would know enough to deliver packages, but they had strategies for keeping the system functioning when carriers lacked that knowledge.

      To get around the problems that plagued shipments by carriers, naturalists sometimes sent important packages by trusted friends rather than unnamed carriers. In a letter to Aubrey, Robert Plot promised, “And as for the booke that I have {one of Aubrey’s manuscripts}, I will take care to send it not by any Carrier, but some faithfull friend, that knows how to value so great a treasure.”⁵⁴ The book that Aubrey loaned Plot—in which Plot found “many things in it much to my purpose, though not <very> many in Oxfordshire”—probably contained notes that Aubrey had made as a natural historical and antiquarian surveyor for John Ogilby’s projected Britannia.⁵⁵ Naturalists also bargained with carriers. In their correspondence regarding Royal Society matters in the early 1680s, Francis Aston and Robert Plot watched carrier charges carefully, and with good reason. After being charged an exorbitant eighteen pence for the delivery of the shipment of “the earth in the little box,” Aston asked Robert Plot to “bargain for the carriage, and set it down on the Bundle for a direction” before sending anything to him from Oxford by carrier.⁵⁶ They could also work through existing commercial networks. William Molyneux worked out an arrangement with a Dublin bookseller to ensure regular delivery of issues of Philosophical Transactions to the Dublin virtuosi. It would have been “difficult to supply some few single persons with this book by itself.”⁵⁷ But issues could be included in the four or five “parcells of books” the bookseller received each year.

      Despite frustrations with knavish carriers and worries that papers could be lost, naturalists depended on their carriers. Notes and asides in their letters indicate just how much. In 1683 and 1684 many of the letters that Aston wrote to William Musgrave and Plot contained some reference to a packet of books or papers being sent by carrier. During these years, the three served overlapping tenures as secretaries of the Royal Society.⁵⁸ Their correspondence dealt largely in the official business of the society. This included determining the contents of each issue of Philosophical Transactions, then printing in Oxford, as well as exchanging scientific news garnered from all over Britain and the Continent, giving accounts of each society’s meetings, and distributing sets of queries for large-scale demographic and natural historical projects that required hundreds of informants, such as William Petty’s demographic study of parish christenings, marriages, and deaths.⁵⁹ Almost invariably each of Aston’s letters included a postscript saying that he was also sending a bundle, or a roll, or a parcel of papers by the next carrier.⁶⁰

      Movers and Shakers: Making Things Travel

      Sometimes circulating the material goods of knowledge was as easy as crossing the street. One day in 1683 John Aubrey decided to show his friend Elias Ashmole a “Barberian Lyon” skin given him by Edmond Wyld, a merchant acquaintance with business in northern Africa (“Barberian” is a reference to “Barbary,” or present-day North Africa):

      I obtained some time since of my worthy friend Edmond Wyld Esq. a Barberian Lyon’s skin…. When I carried [it] in my hand from my Lodging to Mr. Ashmole’s office (a crosse-alley between the 2 streets) there was a great mastiffe belonging to that alley (that I did not presently see), that came smelling after it with great astonishment, the people of the alley called to me, and told me of it: and asked what it was, for they never saw the dog doe so {that is, follow anyone down the street} before, though they (sc. Coach-makers) bring in quantities of tanned skinnes for their use.⁶¹

      Aubrey stepped out to show a rare lion’s pelt to his friend Ashmole, a collector of such things, and a large dog followed him down the alley between his rooms and Ashmole’s office: just another day in the life of the virtuoso, but an incident Aubrey felt worth sharing in a letter to his Oxford-based friend William Musgrave, then a secretary of the Royal Society.⁶² The ease with which Aubrey could step down the alleyway to Ashmole’s office suggests why so many naturalists and so much scientific activity were concentrated in London. Though an experience could be retailed in a letter, collaboration was much easier when people and resources were short walks away from each other.

      Yet not all collaboration could happen in London. Natural history and antiquarian studies took place in farm and field and provincial town; learned activity was distributed across Britain. In addition it required natural and antiquarian materials, such as Aubrey’s lion skin, as well as books and papers. The stuff of natural history included living plants, seeds, dried and pressed leaves, flowers, and roots; formed stones and other mineral specimens; and dead and preserved animals or animal parts, such as pelts and bones. Antiquaries picked up in the course of their travels old coins, fragments of ruined buildings (ancient Roman as well as more recent monastic varieties), urns, Saxon weaponry and jewelry, and sketches of ruined buildings, monuments, and ancient earthworks. As explored in this section, naturalists and antiquaries had to find ways to move all this stuff through their correspondence.

      The impulse driving naturalists to collect and move massive amounts of materials was twofold. In the first place, naturalists were increasingly interested in both systematization and understanding the regional distributions of naturalia. Some gentlemen collectors still built their collections primarily for show, filling them with the rarest and most unusual specimens. Ashmole, for example, sought to highlight objects “extraordinary in their Fabrick” as well as those that might prove useful to medicine, manufacturing, or trade.⁶³ However, naturalists increasingly prioritized systematic collecting.⁶⁴ In order to develop systematic, complete accounts of nature, they needed to collect not only extraordinary natural specimens but also a multitude of more run-of-the-mill specimens. To understand

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