Workdiary 12 ('A Philosophicall Diary, Begun the first of January 1654/5')

Content: Medical and chymical recipes from 1655; sources include Frederick Clodius, George Starkey, Thomas Smart, Sir Kenelm Digby, et al.

General Information

• Creation: 1655
• Hands: uncertain hand (all entries)
• Source: Royal Society, Boyle Papers 8, fols. 140-8
• Languages: English (85 entries) Latin (18 entries, words and phrases in recipes) Italian (1 entry, no. 30) Greek (individual words in entries)
• Length: 104 entries, of which 100 are numbered (grouped as a 'century')
• Format: Foolscap sheets folded to make sets of four pages on which the entries were recorded; each of these sheets was in turn folded once vertically and twice horizontally (in thirds). Pp. 2 and 5-17 have original pagination.
• Note 1: The 100th entry ends at the bottom of fol. 148r. At the top of fol. 148v is the title header 'Centuria II September the 20th 1655', with the rest of the page blank. It is likely, therefore, that Boyle conceived of this work-diary as a 'century' of 100 observations, and it may be the '1st' Century of the set of sequentially numbered workdiaries from the 1650s, ending with 18. From the 1660s, no other work-diary is explicitly titled a 'century' until the three from the late 1680s which have title headers of 'The XVI Century', 'The XVII Century' and 'The XVIII Century'.