Chapter 5

Polite Society and Perceptions of the Sun and the Moon in the Athenian Mercury and the British Apollo, 1691-1711

Anna Marie E. Roos

Advertisements for public lectures on natural philosophy, the opening of the first museums of natural history, and the proliferation of instrument makers selling pocket microscopes, telescopes and orreries, ‘for Ladies and Gentlemen rather than noblemen or Princes’, illustrated that there was a demand in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England for scientific knowledge among ‘wider polite society’.1 Despite rich scholarly analysis of the interplay between cultural factors and the reception of the new science in early modern English society, little work has been done to elucidate the role and influence of the first subscription newspapers in this dissemination of natural philosophy.2 Question-and-answer coffeehouse newspapers, with subscribers writing the inquiries and editors providing the responses, such as the Athenian Mercury (1691-7) and the British Apollo (1708-11) particularly demonstrate the tenets of the natural world about which the larger public was curious; their low cost also meant that they were more accessible to a variety of audiences.3 This essay will specifically analyse the interdependence in these newspapers between politeness, the fashionable study of science and the presentation of scientific ideas about the sun and the moon, or the luminaries. The manner in which heliocentrism and the ideas of an inhabited moon were presented in the Mercury and Apollo will be shown to have been greatly influenced by the culture of sensibility.

Newspapers flourished in London in the 1690s, partially as a consequence of the non-renewal of the Printing Act of 1695, and in 1709 approximately 18 were being published.4 The first newspaper to utilize the question-and-answer format was John Dunton’s Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, the success of which gave rise to a number of imitators such as the British Apollo.5 The two papers answered a large volume of readers’ questions about a variety of subjects, including literature, politics, and conduct advice in their attempt to provide ‘curious amusements for the lngenious’.6

Querists in both the Mercury and Apollo were also extremely curious about the natural world.7 Both publications employed anonymous experts to answer a significant proportion of readers’ queries about the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Gahleo, and Descartes. In the case of the Mercury, Cambridge mathematician Richard Sault (d. 1702), bookseller John Dunton (1659-1733), and theologian Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) perused the Philosophical Transactions to answer questions for their readers, with a particular fondness displayed for the work of Robert Boyle and Rene Descartes.8 An average of 39 scientific questions were addressed in each volume of the Mercury, the total of 760 amounting to 20 per cent of all questions in the twenty volumes of the newspaper; the Apollo had a similar percentage of queries about natural philosophy, and in fact, there were more printed inquiries about ‘science’ in the Apollo than on any other subject.9 The inquiries sometimes went beyond letters; one of the querists of the Apollo apparently sent a package of bones to be identified by the editors without including return postage.10 This miscellaneous inclusion of subjects of natural philosophy with those of literature and politics arguably had more influence in introducing ‘scientific’ subjects to the audience of these coffeehouse newspapers than journals devoted purely to natural philosophy. Although the Mercury’s weekly print run for subscribers was only in the hundreds, because copies of newspapers were also sold in bookshops, passed around and read aloud in coffeehouses, as well as being sold in the street by hawkers, the total audience was likely in the thousands; the Apollo had similar audience numbers.11 Some, such as author, critic and wit Charles Gildon, who wrote a History of the Athenian Mercury (1692), felt that this popular newspaper did as great a service, if not a greater one as the Royal Society in disseminating scientific knowledge.12 Gildon wrote:

England has the Glory of giving Rise to two of the noblest Designs that the Wit of Man is capable of inventing, and they are, the Royal Society, for the experimental improvement of Natural Knowledge, and the Athenian Society for communicating not only that, but all other Sciences to all men, as well as to both Sexes, and the last will, I question not, be imitated, as well as the first, by other Nations.13

Jonathan Swift’s first published poem, Ode to the Athenian Mercury, also praised the newspaper’s efforts in communicating science to the public, and the Mercury’s editor Dunton believed that it was incumbent upon people in his profession to be acquainted with mathematics and natural philosophy so as ‘to give a Man some Knowledge … of the World he inhabits’.14

In these newspapers, title page after title page addressed its audience as the ‘curious’, the ‘inquisitive’, or the ‘ingenious’, promising to give recreational pleasure and benefit via instruction in astronomy and other scientific subjects. Knowledge about elements of the natural world was thus presented to entertain and delight as well as to instruct. Aristocratic virtuosi or curiosi expressed their curiosity about nature through the purchase, collection, and arrangement of objects of nature and scientific instruments; the purchase of these newspapers allowed ‘Londoners who frequented the coffee houses’ where respectable dress, manners and the price of a drink afforded entry, as well as ‘country gentlemen interested in the town’, to participate vicariously in these fashionable pursuits.15 Lawrence Klein has shown that late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England was a society in which Whig and politically moderate gentlemen, latitudinarian clergy and prosperous Dissenters created a culture of politeness to formulate the ‘hegemony of the landed classes’.16 Although the purpose of politeness was initially to emphasize the exclusivity of the elite, it was subsequently marketed to non-elites in a variety of encyclopaedic guides as well as in newspapers like the Mercury and the Apollo, particularly between 1660 and 1730.17

Dictates of polite culture and curiosity about the new science influenced which tenets of natural philosophy were accepted and rejected in the newspapers. This was particularly true in the case of novel scientific knowledge about the luminaries, concerning heliocentrism, as well as the ideas of the plurality of worlds and an earth-like and inhabited moon. The Mercury and Apollo indeed aimed to be like ‘virtual salons’. The Mercury in the 1690s fielded public controversy over such issues as Copernicanism with a display of neutral and witty discourse to promote an aura of gentlemanly disinterestedness and objectivity. However, by the first decade of the eighteenth century, the overweening influence of Newtonianism in England and its implicit acceptance of a sun-centred universe made it less deliciously subversive to talk about; as Newtonianism increasingly became connected to polite sociability, the Apollo subsequently publicized that belief in heliocentrism was a means to distinguish the polite from the vulgar.18 Moreover, because the influence of French absolutism and culture on English society was under increasing suspicion after the Restoration, the ‘Frenchness’ of Cartesian science and its support of the idea of a plurality of worlds were viewed with growing scepticism. Thus, there is a shift in the manner in which scientific ideas about the sun and moon are presented in the newspapers from 1691 to 1711, a shift affected by the increasing influence of the culture of sensibility and politeness.

Editors and audiences

Who were the editors and audiences for the Mercury and the Apollo? Although the editors of the Mercury implied to their readers that they encompassed a large group of virtuosi, the few men that were actually in charge of the publication did in fact have some professional connection to astronomy and the mathematical sciences in their own right.19 Richard Sault, one of the co-founders of the Mercury, kept a ‘mathematick school’ near the Royal Exchange in London, and had some of his mathematical works published in the Philosophical Transactions.20 Sault also collaborated with authors of popular pamphlets of scientific knowledge, such as William Leybourn, an almanac maker and surveyor; in 1694, Sault appended his Treatise of Algebra to Leybourn’s astronomical manual Pleasure with Profit, a work with extensive engravings that was aimed at a readership of wealthier gentlemen; Leybourn’s work was recommended by John Houghton, a fellow of the Royal Society.21 Leybourn’s Pleasure with Profit was in turn published by the editor of the Mercury, Whiggish Dissenter John Dunton.

The editors of the Mercury were thus members of a larger proto-professional class who attempted to associate themselves with polite society. Despite the fact he made his living as an author and printer, Leybourn identified with the gentleman’s reluctance to publish; he utilized a pseudonym when publishing his Planometria, or the whole art of surorying land because the treatise was ‘so immaterial … and too particular for a Subject of so large an extent’ and too artisanal a topic for the cultured image he was trying to cultivate.22 Dunton, like Leybourn, identified himself and the audience for his publications with the culture of gentility; he claimed his ‘Athenian Prqject … was well receiv’d by the Politer sort of Mankind.’23 Dunton also distanced himself from publication because he was anonymous in his position as an editor of the Mercury, although his other extensive publishing activities argue that Dunton generally did not display the gentlemanly reluctance to publish. In fact, the middling Dunton often instead publicized self-fashioned feelings of aristocratic duty to relay scientific information with candour to serve the nation. Even over the time of the Mercurys production, Dunton increasingly announced his desire to move away from the large numbers of questions of the heart published in his paper to incorporate more queries about natural philosophy and mathematics for the betterment of a larger sector of society.24

In the case of the Apollo, the identity of the writers of the newspaper is more open to speculation; there were probably as many as twelve men in this ‘society of gentlemen’ who answered questions, and of these only six can be identified with certainty.25 Of these six, two were professionals in the sciences. Dr William Coward (1657?-1725) was an oculist, and an intimate of Dr Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society (1727-41). Sloane corrected proofs for Coward’s Ophthalmoiatria (1706), a work that ridiculed the Cartesian placement of an immaterial soul in the pineal gland.26 Dr James Mauclerc was a physical scientist and theologian, who answered some seventy questions in each of the first two volumes of the Apollo.

The identity of the audience for the scientific principles presented in these papers is yet more controversial. On the surface, the audience for the Mercury and Apollo appeared to be prosperous or at least aspiring to gentlemanly prosperity. The Apollo charged a half crown for its advertisements, which included advertisements for runaway apprentices, a lost ring with diamonds, a missing puppy, and a vellum pocket book, with ‘divers Receipts for Rent in it’, indicating the social grouping of some of its prosperous intended audience.27 Although some readers could have been gentleman landholders with rent receipts, notices for missing apprentices indicate that those engaged in business, who might be among the middling sorts, were also subscribers.

If we in fact examine the ‘Emblem of the Athenian Society, 1692’, engraved by von Hove to serve as the frontispiece to Gildon’s History of the Athenian Society, we see how editor John Dunton conceived of the audience for his newspaper (Plate 5.1).28 The editors, some veiled to preserve their anonymity, are portrayed in a coffeehouse with the owner whose ‘query [was] quickly understood, he only asks – d’ye think his coffee good.’29 Pens in hand, the editors are shown receiving the majority of their queries from respectably dressed female and male subscribers. Some of the men are illustrated using globes or pointing their crossstaffs at ‘all England’s rarityes … gathered here’, such as multiple suns orparhelia, and a comet.30 One of the verses in this emblem refers to these astronomers and their questions:

Thinking our Notions too jejune

Some take their Aim at Madam moon

images

Plate 5.1 Frederick Henrik von Hove, ‘An Emblem of the Athenian Society’. Frontispiece to Charles Gildon, History of the Athenian Sociery (London, 16 92). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Some bring hard queries, which we crack,

And throw the gazing World the Kernels back.31

However, the London mob is also illustrated in the emblem; though most are engaged in some sort of violence (including beating and hanging and imploring the ‘noble Athenians’ for help), in the lower right, handing in their letters to the editors, there are a few female washerwomen. The washerwomen are described in the following verse:

avoid you rest of noisy fools

once more you are not in our rules

could we but please if learned few

which send [letters] … we could dispense with you32

One interpretation of this verse is that because the Athenian Mercury fashioned itself as a respectable publication, it was of considerable irritation to its editors that its audience was not completely contained within the parameters of polite society. Of course, Dunton may merely have been commenting that one had to be respectable to know who was not.33 He certainly thought himself in a position to know, as he had written several works about the reformation of manners and polite society.34 Brian Cowan has also illustrated that Dunton associated female presence in coffeehouses with sins of bawdry, the bookseller intimating that the coffeehouse was a ‘fit place for gendemen of leisure … but not for lower classes, whose interests there must needs be licentious.’35

Indeed, because the paper could be read in a coffeehouse essentially for the price of a cup of coffee, it is possible the stray washerwomen may not only have been guilty of licentiousness, but of other sins, such as stealing copies. In fact, this possibility of stolen Mercuries may be alluded to in the engraving itself, which prominendy illustrated a selection adapted from an emblem book in its upper lefthand corner alongside the price of the publication.36 In this ‘emblem within an emblem’ a monkey thrusts a cat’s paws into a roasting fire of chestnuts, and remarks ‘Viviturne rapto’ (or ‘May he [or she] not live by plunder’) and ‘How sweet is interloper’s hire!’ Another possibility is that this admonition was to the female hawkers of the newspaper. Berry has noted that these female newspaper sellers or ‘Mercuries’ were mentioned by name in Dunton’s autobiography, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705).37 Despite Dunton’s assertion that the Athenian Mercury was read by ‘the Politer sort of Mankind’, the newspaper hawkers and the washerwoman were literal and social plunderers of polite discourse.38 As Rob Iliffe has commented, some contemporaries felt the Athenian Mercury was dangerous because it was a levelling text, ‘with no markers for the reader to distinguish between the social hierarchy of the contributors.’39 Therefore, Dunton’s appeal to politeness may have not only been a technique to make his paper fashionable, but one which attempted to prevent it from being considered subversive.40

Copernicanism among editors and readers

Although the natural world was certainly an object of serious study among scientists during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it provided concomitantly interesting subjects of entertainment and edification for a wider reading public that encompassed, but also superseded, the boundaries of polite society. Many astronomical discoveries and theories of the new science, such as Copernicanism, the possibility of lunar inhabitation, and the plurality of worlds were topics that were still a matter of vociferous discussion in late seventeenth-century publications of popular astronomy. Although by the late seventeenth century, Copernicanism was not a subject for dispute among mathematicians or astronomers, there was not universal acceptance of heliocentrismin wider society on religious grounds, and the literary world was especially hesitant to accept whole-heartedly the Copernican doctrine.41 The same trend is seen among editors and readers of the newspapers. The editors of the Mercury did not advocate any single cosmological theory. One reader posed a question which indicated that choosing a planetary system was still very much a contested and perplexing matter: ‘Doth the Earth or the Sun move?’ The Mercury replied, ‘Those philosophers that are for Terremotion, yet will have the Sun to move about its Centre, and those that are for a fixation of the Earth will have the Sun move according to the common Acceptation. That much at present to the Importunate Querist.’42

Seven months later, another querist asked, ‘What is your Opinion concerning the motion of the Earth or the Sun: I desire neither Reasons nor Authorities, but upon the whole, your own Opinion upon this Matter?’43 Apparendy versed in the heliocentric cosmology of Descartes, the editors of the Mercury still hedged their bets: ‘We disagree in our Opinions about it, the Ptolomaick System is very false in some things, and the Cartesian is not demonstration, as all Des Cartes’ proselytes confess themselves; there are very plausible Arguments on both sides, and plausibility is the utmost either party can pretend to.’44

Why was the Mercury so evasive in its opinions about cosmology? Certainly, the editors’ refusal to answer the question kept readers guessing about what the editors really thought, which was good for business; it is not surprising that letters continued to pour in, pressing the anonymous editors for their true opinions on the matter. In fact, Dunton was an avowed Copernican, who believed in ‘ten thousand more Worlds than are already discover’d’, preferred ‘Galileo’s Tube to Ptolomy’s Spectacles’ and thought that the planets were inhabited.45 Further, books of popularized astronomy often included a compendium of all astronomical systems, such as John Seller’s Pocket Book of astronomical illustrations, in which he provided a nicely rendered ‘curious and choice collection’ of diagrams of the Tychonic, Ptolemaic, and Copernican systems, along with reprints of the latest solar and lunar maps.46 As in Seller’s book, presentation of all the astronomical systems in the newspapers may also have been perceived as giving the buyer better value, a larger collection of scientific ideas for his virtual printed cabinet of curiosities that could at least abstracdy emulate the virtuoso’s literal collection of interesting objects from the natural world.47

The presentation of both sides of the astronomical debate also gave the author or editor an aura of disinterestedness and objectivity. The Mercury after all was described in its tide by the adjective ‘casuistical’ and in addition to its presentation of scientific advice, it addressed itself to solving cases of conscience, so trustworthy advice would be crucial to its survival.48 Science in these newspapers was also presented as a gendemanly version of civil conversation, one that would establish credibility and a polite atmosphere of trust between author, editor, and reader.49 The atmosphere of polite conversation was one of genial tolerance and non-dogmatic conclusions, rather than emphasizing exact logic. Shapin has illustrated that these norms of polite conversation were ‘a characteristic mark of the English natural-philosophical enterprise’, which vigilandy protected the factual domain along ‘with injunctions to speak modesdy, diffidendy, and doubtingly about the domain of the theoretical.’50 In its attempts to preserve mannerly conversation about a publicly controversial topic such as heliocentrism, a publication like the Mercury was emulating the polite discourse of the gendeman virtuosi.

However, by the first decade of the eighteenth century, Copernicanism was no longer a scandalous topic in popular literature. Newton’s theories, made respectable by their association with natural theology, relied implicidy upon heliocentrism and had been popularized in coffeehouse lectures beginning in 1698.51 Subsequendy, we find that coffeehouse newspapers like The British Apollo considered the Copernican theory part of polite conversation. In the 1708 quarterly supplement, where the editors ‘inserted those Questions for which we had not Room before’, one reader, using scriptural argument, challenged the editors’ support of an immovable sun. The querist wrote, ‘Gentlemen, in your Paper Numb. 69. You hold the Sun to be an Immoveable Center [sic], and the Earth to be Elliptical, which Opinions seem not to be consonant to Scripture or Reason.’52 The reader mentioned that in the Bible ‘in the Days of Joshua the Sun was stop’d in its course for some time … Again, if the Sun be fix’d, how was it plac’d in the Firmament (as we read in Genesis) for Signs and Seasons, for Days and Years’.53 The editors replied that they adhered to the theory of accommodation, which postulated that the Bible was totally excluded from any scientific discussion of astronomy on the grounds that it was not meant to convey accurate scientific information. They wrote

the Scriptures were never design’d to teach us a System of Astronomy, and therefore accommodated themselves to the Capacities of Men, who in those Easy times understood nothing of the Earth’s Motion. And this is but a common mode of Speech, since those great Astronomers, who defend the Copernican System, do yet commonly say, that the Sun is Set; which is yet no other than a Compliance with the vulgarly receiv’d Hypothesis.54

No fewer than seven questions and answers reaffirming the validity of the Copernican system were published in the Apollo between 1708 and 1711, indicating that between the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth century, Copernicanism began to be seen as a key component of polite knowledge.

However, despite the editors’ efforts, some querists were even more fundamentally confused about astronomy. For instance, the issue of whether the earth or the moon moved was the subject of a dispute between friends, and the Apollo was called on to mediate: ‘Q. Gentlemen, The other Night a Friend of mine and I, looking at the Moon, fell into a deep Dispute, whether it is Fixt or Moveable; his Opinion of it was that it is Fixt, and the Earth Moveable; but mine was that the Moon is Moveable, and the Earth Fixt. Your Opinion in this point will be very acceptable to Your subscriber, N. J.’55 The Apollo’s answer demonstrated a firm commitment to the Copernican system, and even some embarrassment that one of their subscribers was still uninformed about the motion of the earth:

A. Both you and your Friend are mistaken: For every one that understands but the first Elements of Astronomy knows, that according to the Copernican System of the World, the Earth Moves about the Sun in the space of a Year, and that the Moon moves about the Earth every Month. And as for the Diurnal Motion of the Moon and the whole Heavens, that is caused by the Revolution of the Earth about its Axis every 24 Hours. These Things are so Vulgarly known, that were it not to gratify the Querist, we sho’d be ashamed to Explain them.56

And when two querists desired the Apollo to decide whether the sun went around the earth, or the earth around the sun in 24 hours, the Apollo joked that the one opinion was the Ptolomaic hypothesis and that the other querist’s opinion of a year lasting one day was ‘so very New, as to be intirely his own’,57

Although by 1708, the editors of the Apollo evidently considered knowledge of earthly motion something that certainly should be known to members of polite society, if not the ‘meaner sort’, querists were not ashamed to ask what was for them still a perplexing question. Others wanted to know answers to even more basic questions, such as when and why the ‘Moon appears in different forms, as a full moon, an Half Moon, &c’, or ‘Why the sun shines when it rains?’58 Although some had more sophisticated questions, such as ‘Why dothe the Moon in the space of 24 Hours, sometimes move in Her Orb above 15 Degrees, and at other times Scarcely 12?’, one also suspects that some subscribers struggled to believe any astronomy, as opposed to keeping to notions based on simple sense experience and Biblical teachings.59 Just as it was difficult for subscribers to reconcile Copernicanism with the daily experience of a non-moving earth, it also proved perplexing for one querist of the Apollo to comprehend the relative sizes of the sun and the earth, and so he decided to wager on the outcome. Along with threats, explaining to the editors that the outcome of a wager depended upon the answer was a common technique to ‘hurry’ an answer.60 The editors of the Apollo settled 123 real and fictitious bets during the paper’s publication, with wagerers betting fowl, bowls of punch and wine, and sums up to 20 guineas.61 Thus, one reader stated, ‘I some time since laid a Wager with a Person, who affirrned, that the Sun was far greater than the whole Earth, which I did say was impossible: but it was resolved to refer it to your Arbitration (being assured of your impartiality).’62 One wonders what the querist’s response was when the editors of the Apollo informed him that ‘the magnitude of the Sun beyond that of the Earth, is, according to Computation, in the proportion of 450 to an Unity’ [450 times larger than the Earth], or if the bet was paid.63

Pluralities of questions and pluralities of worlds

Another subject for controversy in the newspapers was the idea of the moon as an earth-like world, reflecting the controversy over the plurality of worlds in wider society.64 In the first half of the seventeenth century, works published or known in England – Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1610), Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), John Wilkins’ Discovery (London, 1636), and Johannes Hevelius’ Selenographia (Danzig, 1647) – had advocated a moon with seas, mountains, and perhaps inhabitants. However, in 1651, the Jesuit and anti-Copernican Giovanni Battisti Riccioli argued against the idea of an inhabited moon in his magisterial work Almagestum novum astronomia.65 In response to Bernard le Bouyer de Fontanelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (translated by Aphra Behn into English in 1688), in which he posited a lunar atmosphere and inhabitants, Christian Huygens in the work translated as The Celestial worlds discover’d (London, 1698), believed that ‘the lack of atmosphere and thus the lack of water was confirmed by the immediate occultation of a body by the moon, without passing through any apparent atmosphere’, and thus that the moon was lifeless.66 As the scientific community increasingly disavowed the notion of ‘lunarians’ or inhabitants of the moon, the idea of an inhabited moon became a ripe one for satire among Restoration authors. Samuel Butler’s The Elephant in the Moon (167 6), which mocked the Royal Society, Aphra Behn’s adaptation of a French farce about a lunar race entitled The Emperor in the Moon (1687), and Elkanah Settle’s opera, The World in the Moon (1697), used the lunar landscape not as an inspirational place of scientific wonder and discovery, but rather as a dystopia to lampoon human failings, including those of the scientific credulity of the virtuosi.67

The same shift of attitude towards the idea of a plurality of worlds is evident in the Mercury and the Apollo. There is a relationship between the Copernican theory and the acceptance of the idea of an inhabited moon; heliocentrism destroyed the Aristotelian idea of a qualitative dichotomy between the earth and heavens and thus made a theory of an infinite number of possibly-inhabited worlds more plausible. Certainly we see the same pattern of studied neutrality in the presentation of an inhabited moon and the plurality of worlds in the Mercury as we did in the presentation of Copernicanism. The Mercury, responding to a question about the purpose of the stars, said only that perhaps [the stars served] ‘for Worlds or Receptacles for other unknown Creatures of a distinct Species from Man; or for other uses.’68

However, this neutrality in the Mercury was supplanted by more evident and satiric scepticism about the plurality of worlds in the Apollo. Some of this perceptual shift may have had to do with increasing concern about the influence of French politesse and scientific discourse on English society. After the 1688 Revolution, there was a re-evaluation of the cultural relations between England and France that was bound up with the Whiggish distaste for French absolutism.69 Behn’s translation of Fontanelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, a casual and amusing scientific explanation of Descartes’ discussion of the Copernican system, thus revealed a growing suspicion about the influence of French culture and science in England as well as a deep scepticism about many of the precepts presented in Fontanelle’s work.70 Descartes’ idea of the plurality of worlds and the related concept of an inhabited moon became associated with the dangers of French influence; just as the English uncritically accepted French fashions, Behn complained they credulously accepted French scientific ideas. In Behn’s opinion, Fontanelle’s popularization of Cartesian cosmology

hath failed in his Design; for endeavouring to rend this part of Natural Philosophy familiar, he hath turned it into Ridicule; he hath pushed his wild Notion of the Plurality of Worlds to that heighth [sic] of Extravagancy, that he most certainly will confound those Readers, who have not Judgment and Wit to distinguish between what is truly solid (or, at least probable) and what is trifling and airy … [he claimed] that there are thousands of Worlds inhabited … besides our Earth, and hath urged this Fancy too far.71

For Behn, Fontanelle had clearly let his own imagination run away with him, stepping outside the boundaries of reasoned consideration of matters of fact typical of English scientific discourse, and thus failing to communicate the theories of astronomy to his polite audience. If Fontanelle had rather adhered more to the opinions of’learned Men’ and the Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society, ‘he had deserved much more Praise’.72

The suspicion and ridicule associated with the extravagance of the Cartesian matter theory and his cosmology was also displayed in The British Apollo. Readers would sometimes append facetious names to questions, such as ‘Archimedes’, ‘Pythagoras’, or even ‘Dorothy Pear-Tree’ and ‘Stark-Staring Margery.’73 In a similar manner, one reader wrote:

Apollo, In a Dispute concerning Matter, it was ask’d how the Particles of it hung together, some would solve it by pressure of the Air [Robert Boyle’s explanation], or rather A ether [a Cartesian explanation]; but this not giving Satisfaction to all that were present, you are desir’d to set it in a Clearer Light, by doing which you’ll oblige your Subscriber, and I may say, Serviceable Friend, D-s C-rt-s.74

The scepticism about matter philosophy was so pronounced that ‘Descartes’ himself was portrayed asking the Apollo for clarification! The persona ‘D-sC-rt-s also described himself as a ‘serviceable’ or useful friend, but perhaps Cartesian philosophy was even too ‘serviceable’ for his own taste. After all, Descartes gave detailed explanations about how the size, shape and motion of unseen bits of matter produced all types of physical effects, his disciples following suit in using Cartesian explanations to account for all natural phenomena. We have seen that the editors of the Mercury had commented that ‘the Cartesian system is not demonstration, as all Des Cartes’ proselytes confess themselves’, and in fact the speculative tenor of Cartesian philosophy was troubling to a number of English critics and popularizers of science who advocated Baconian empiricism.75 For instance, Edward Howard in the preface to his Remarks on the New Philosophy’ of Descartes (London, 1700) complained that ‘if we confide on the Principles of Des-Cartes, we must rely on fictitious Inventions, instead of warrantable experience.’76 As in Behn’s work, French philosophy was again portrayed as an extravagant philosophy that did not give satisfying intellectual explanations.

In a like manner, the Apollo lampooned the idea of the plurality of worlds promoted by Cartesian philosophy. One querist asked:

Astronomers say,

There’s a World in the Moon:

But what says your Godship, Apollo;

For if by Your Light

To Us She seems Bright,

Whose Dictates so safe can we follow?

Since all their fine Lectures

At best are Conjectures

And of what Themselves are not sure,

Apollo, or None

Is able Alone,

This mighty great doubt for to cure.77

The Apollo replied that it could not cure this reader’s great doubt about a world in the moon, and countered in a witty and satiric fashion replete with double entendre.

Apollo surveys

More Illustrious Orbs,

And so disregards his small Sister,

That as oft as this Globe

Her light did Disrobe,

He scarcely can say, he Mist her.

But to so many Lectures

Not to add New Conjectures,

His sons will not give a Decision;

For to lay about,

Amidst so much Doubt,

Perhaps might but cause a Derision.78

As they did with the idea of a world in the moon, the Apollo treated the subject of lunar inhabitants with a mocking incredulity. In a question which bordered on the facetious, one writer was apparently aware of tales of a populated moon and tired of a disloyal amour. She wondered if ‘luna is inhabited’ and if there were ‘faithful Lovers there’.79 The editors replied in kind to the reader termed ‘the impatient Constantia’; although it was possible the moon was inhabited, it mattered not whether ‘those Lunarians [be] false or true … Or be they brightest Forms or shew, Like Swine in foulest Weather’.80 After all, the editors explained getting to the moon and its lovers was more of a problem: ‘twill harder be to solve how you, / Alas! Will mount up thither.’81 Clearly, a serious answer about such fancies as an inhabited moon would expose the Apollo to the same satire that the editors promulgated.82

Conclusion

To a significant degree, the newspapers analysed in this essay mirrored current scientific debates and perceptions of the luminaries. However, the manner in which these ideas were presented was greatly influenced by the dictates of polite culture. The Mercury promoted conversation with an aim of ‘resolving all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious of either sex’, and fielded academic controversies with a display of witty discourse. The ‘virtual salons’ of the Mercury were ones in which the editors often presented both sides of scientific debates for the delighted and acquisitive curiosity of their readers, as well as for the benefit of the publishers’ pocketbooks.

However, when firm judgement was eventually passed by the Apollo about tenets of natural philosophy, polite conversation could turn into satiric censure. Heliocentrism was no longer deliciously naughty to talk about by the early eighteenth century; disbelief in its tenets became a mark of one outside polite society. Because French politesse was under suspicion, Cartesian science and its conception of a plurality of worlds was also viewed with increasing scepticism. By the early eighteenth century, there was an increasingly fine line between being ‘scientifically literate’ in, and scientifically credulous of, polite and impolite curiosity about the natural world. Like other forms of knowledge, perceptions of the natural world were guided by the need for norms of sociability that often bypassed scientific authority.