Croonian Lecture:—The laws of muscular motion

Abstract

On November 28,1660, a small body of learned men “according to the usuall custom of most of them” met together at Gresham College in the city of London to hear a lecture by one of their number, Mr. (later Sir Christopher) Wren. “After the lecture was ended, they did, according to their usual manner, withdrawe for mutual converse. Where, amongst other matters that were discoursed of, something was offered about a designe of founding a Colledge for the promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning.” From this “converse,’’ thus recorded in its first Journal-book, arose later the Royal Society. The record adds “Mr. Croone, though absent” (and aged only27) “was named for Register.” Dr. William Croone, Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, Doctor of Medicine of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and author of a book “ De Ratione Motus Musculorum ,” published in 1664, dying in 1684, left a plan for an annual lecture before the Royal Society, on muscular motion, but no provision for it in his will. His widow, who married again, Dame Mary Sadleir, by her will dated 1701, remedied that omission, and directed that one-fifth of the clear rent of the “King’s Head Tavern” should be vested in the Royal Society for “the Settling a Lecture for the Advancement of Natural Knowledge,” more specifically “A Lecture or Discourse of the Nature and Property of Local Motion, and the application of the Doctrine thereof to explicate the causes and reasons of the Phenomena : every such Lecture and Discourse to be accompanied always, and joined with an Experiment proper for it.” This last provision in Lady Sadleir’s will was interpreted by the Society as a means “ to prevent the Lecture from becoming the vehicle of unsubstantial theories .”