Edward Tyson's Phocaena: a case study in the institutional context of scientific publishing

This article argues that the prefatory essay to Edward Tyson's 1680 pamphlet Phocaena deliberately sets in opposition English and French institutional models of scientific investigation and publication. Tyson took account of Mémoires pour Servir à l'Histoire Naturelle des Animaux, produced by the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, which was implicitly contrasted with Tyson's own investigations and his plans to extend them. Tyson used the contrast both to frame the Royal Society in terms of an ideal of open collaboration and as a means of demonstrating his independence of action. I suggest that Phocaena may be used to illuminate contemporary anxieties about the merits of ephemeral formats for research in natural philosophy, the desirability and the burden of royal patronage, and the fluidity of the Royal Society's experimental and publishing procedures in the wake of Henry Oldenburg's death. Finally, I examine how superficially similar courses of collaborative investigation could be shaped to very different ends and outcomes by their institutional contexts.