Reproduced with Permission. Text © 2001 by David Haycock.
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Many eighteenth-century physicians made their first step into London's intellectual society through the doors of the Royal Society before then entering the Royal College of Physicians, and prominent natural philosophers who had already followed such a path included Sir Hans Sloane, who in 1719 became the College's new President. Since 1518 the College had held the right to restrict the number of those practising medicine in London to its own Fellows, but this monopoly had been lost in a court case in 1656, and a charter which would have restored this right had been blocked by the Society of Apothecaries in 1664. The College's authority in restricting medical practice in London to its own members had been dealt a further blow in 1704, when the House of Lords had permitted apothecaries the right to administer drugs. So it was that by the early 1720s defiance to the College's authority over metropolitan medical practice was widespread, and it is in this context that we witness Stukeley's election to a Fellowship.
As well as the administrative problems the Royal College was facing, all was not well in the study of medicine itself, even though traditional medicine and anatomy as espoused by the three major ancient writers -- Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen -- had undergone profound change during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One important influence in its progress was the development of anatomical studies during the Renaissance, but another was the new medical methodology promoted by the Swiss physician and alchemist Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus (1493-1541). He had based his medicine on chemical principles, believing that disease was caused by the various operation of salts, sulphurs and mercury in the body. Although this sounds like a relatively modern conception of disease, he also believed in the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, a powerful analogy whose influence may be seen at work in Stukeley's writings. Paracelsus's new approach to medicine did not spread widely until after his death, but from the 1570s Paracelsianism in varying forms was disseminated throughout northern Europe. The term 'iatrochemist' started to be used to describe those adhering to these new chemical principles in medicine, and by the late seventeenth-century 'iatrochemistry' had largely superseded the ancient authority of Galenism as the foundation of modern medical studies. In the same way that Cartesianism used analogy from the operation of clockwork and machines, the iatrochemists used analogies from chemistry, such as distillation and fermentation. Another important change in approaches to medical studies in this period was William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, which he published in 1628 in De Motu Cordis.
But in spite of this new methodology and radical discovery in anatomy, it remained of some concern to many of Stukeley's medical friends and other contemporaries that the new science had not brought advances in physic similar to those in other sciences. Most diseases were still frustratingly difficult to cure, and medical practices such as blood-letting, despite physicians' strong beliefs to the contrary, had no efficacy. And whilst discoveries in the New World did bring valuable new medicines such as Peruvian bark (quinine), it also brought increasing encounters with fatal afflictions such as yellow fever and amoebic dysentery. In 1704 Mead wondered in print why 'notwithstanding the considerable advances made in the study of nature by the moderns … this useful art has not received those benefits, which might reasonably be expected from a surer method of reasoning'. He even went so far as to fret 'medicine still deals so much in conjecture, that it hardly deserves the name of a science.'De imperio Solis ac Lunae in Corpora Humana et Morbis inde oriundis, and first appeared in English in Halley's Miscellanea Curiosa in 1708.
It is wonderful, as well as much to be lamented, that this useful and important Art should be improved so little in so many Centuries; and that its State should still continue so uncertain and imperfect. We have hitherto discovered few Remedies of a peculiar specifical Virtue, for the Cure of any Diseases.
This feeling of uncertainty is largely uncharacteristic of early modern scientific practice, and the question of whether medical studies progressed or largely stood still in England in the early eighteenth century remains contentious. But if an answer could be found in the new science for the difficulties facing medical practice, Mead and other physicians believed it would lye in the Newtonian philosophy. But what relevance could the laws of motion and gravity have upon human health? Mead's remarks above are taken from his Treatise Concerning the Influence of the Sun and the Moon Upon Human Bodies (1704, English translation 1748), and this is where the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm enters our account. For as Stukeley observed, 'the Animal Æeconomy' consisted 'of two parts, solid & fluid, just as the vast Globe of the Earth', and as both were the work of God's 'Omnipotent hand' they were both 'subject to much the same laws.'
Mead had studied physic in Leyden under the Scottish physician Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713), who had been an early proponent of the application of Newtonian theory to the practice of medicine. This application rested on two statements. One was taken from Newton's essay 'De Natura Acidorum', published in John Harris's Lexicon Technicum in 1710, which discussed the proposed action of short-range forces in salts and acids analogous to gravity. The other came from Query 31 of the new Latin edition of the Opticks, where Newton observed that whilst the attractions of gravity, magnetism, and electricity 'reach to very sensible distances, and so have been observed by vulgar Eyes … there may be others which reach to so small distances as hitherto escape Observation'. Together, these statements helped to establish 'a plausible rival to standard mechanical chemistry.'Treatise that 'a previous acquaintance with the Mathematical principles of natural philosophy' was 'requisite for comprehending this subject in its full extent'. A New Theory of Physick and Diseases, Founded on the Principles of the Newtonian Philosophy (1725). In his preface to this book Robinson asked, 'Is not the Mechanism of the Body conducted by the same laws that support the motions of the greater Orbs of the Universe? and are not all the Changes and Variations it suffers in Diseases, to be resolv'd from an Alteration of Matter and Motion?'A Treatise of the Hypochondriak and Hysterick Diseases (2nd edn, London 1730) p. 182 (first published in 1711).Researches into the Causes, Nature, and Treatment of the More Prevalent Diseases of India, and of Warm Climates Generally (London, 1828), Vol. 2, p. 247. The belief that the planets affected health long preceded Newtonian medicine.
Yet despite this allegiance with the new science, the authority of the old was in no way forgotten or totally superseded. In his address 'To the Reader' of Of the Spleen, Stukeley noted that the portrait at the front of his book was that of 'the famous Marcus Modius, Physician in the court of Augustus.' He explained that he had included this print 'to show my high esteem for the wisdom of the ancients.'Of the Spleen, as in all his other works, Stukeley used numerous sources, ranging from Aristotle, Democritus, Pliny and Galen to Drelincourt, Mead, the Philosophical Transactions and material from 'the royal academy at Paris.'New Theory of Physick that 'In the ensuing Discourse I have neither confined myself to the Authority of the Ancients, nor Discoveries of the Moderns; but have equally used either, as they seem'd best to answer the real Service of Physick.'Account of Animal Secretion (1708) that the highly mechanistic explanations in his 1703 work on menstruation, Emmeonologia, were all 'both known and practised by the Ancients' and argued that if the design of nature was constant, 'this Attraction of the small Particles of Matter is no Innovation in Philosophy', but a fact which had been long known in ancient times, and subsequently lost.An Account of Animal Secretion, the Quantity of Blood in the Humane Body, and Muscular Motion (London 1708) Preface pp. ix, xxvii; quoted in Guerrini (1996) p. 300.A Treatise on a Consumption of the Lungs (London, 1727), preface, p. xix.A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies. Anatomy proved divine engineering. Newtonianism and religion would be the two principal themes expressed in Stukeley's own medical works of this period.
Stukeley presented his first paper on an anatomical subject to the Royal Society on 18 February 1720, reading 'on the dichotomy of a woman'.
Dr Stukely laid before the Society a large Draught of an Anatomy of a Womans body being the representation of a section of ye head and Trunk separating the Right side from the Left by a perpendicular plane Dividing the Scull from the Top of the head and passing down through the sternum of the Breast the spine of the back and the middle between the Ossa pubis.
He likewise Delivered a Discourse explaining the several parts of the Body exhibited in the said Draught by References of Letter and Containing withall a Brief Account of the uses of the parts in some acco[u]n[t]s necessary to life such as Digestion, Concoction, the Circulation of the Blood and also in Impregnation for continuing the Species all w[hi]ch was read.
Most interestingly, as well as this concern with the principal life functions of the body, Stukeley made the allusion between physical anatomy and the recording of architectural draughts. As the minutes record, in his discourse Stukeley
first Recommends this Method of Dissecting bodies vertically as a usefull way in Anatomy for the same reason as such sort of sections are found to be useful in Architecture. That is because by this means we can obtain a more compleat and perfect Idea of the scituation of the parts which ly behind one another than can be done in the ordinary way of Dissection where those parts being hid must be taken out of their proper places and examined separately.
Though Leonardo da Vinci made drawings of dissected bodies in this fashion in the Renaissance, it would be interesting to establish whether Stukeley was the first English anatomist to use such a method, for it would have been an important innovation in anatomical technique. Given that there are no remarks recorded to contrary, it would appear it was a novel method to all those present at the Royal Society when the paper was read. Stukeley then went on to discuss the processes of digestion, the circulation of the blood 'according to the usual system', and then proceeded 'to the explication of the Business of Impregnation.' He then moved on to 'the upper cavity of the Brains of which he Declines giving any particular account thro the difficulty of the subject further than this, That it is with reason held to be the great Repositor of Animal Spirits'.
Digestion, circulation, reproduction and 'animal spirits': these were the subjects which most interested Stukeley as a physician. But what exactly was meant by 'animal spirits'? The philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753), with whom Stukeley had a brief correspondence on the medicinal subject of tar water, defined them as 'the instrumental or physical cause both of sense and motion.'Opticks, and the shortcomings in anatomical knowledge that Newton observed at the conclusion of the 'General Scholium' of the Principia. There Newton had reflected upon the mystery of animal spirits, and what it was that gave bodies life:
And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well as repelling as attracting the neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explain'd in few words, nor are we furnish'd with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.
It was on this hesitant note that the 1713 edition of the Principia ended, in effect a call to physicians to explore and experiment further. And it was this challenge that Stukeley took up in his manuscript on 'Creation', an extensive treatise which he began in 1718 and continued writing over this period to at least c. 1734, and in which he expounded his ideas on the possible reconciliation between natural science and the Scriptures were expounded.
The Sun, Stukeley explained at the start of his argument on the origin of life, was 'a solid Fountain of fire' which sent out its 'Genial Warmth' and 'sets all things into action.' It awakes the plants and the whole 'drowsy tribe of animals' after winter, and in spring inspires them and humans to sexual activity.was an effect of motion, it was not applicable in the case of blood circulation, '& I believ Water shut up in a Vessel & put into what Motion you pleas will never grow hot any more than the waves of Rivers dashing against the Shores'.
Harvey had written that the body's warmth came from the blood, but he also believed that in fulfilling this function the blood became 'refrigerated' and 'barren' and it returned to the heart in order to recover its 'perfection' and 'naturall heat'. Harvey had thus described the heart in De Motu Cordis as 'the beginning of life, the Sun of the Microcosm'.De Motu Cordis (1653 edn), quoted in Conrad et al (1995) p. 336.Advancement of Learning that the 'Sensitive Soul' was ''a corporeal substance attenuated by heat & made invisibl … a thin gentle gale of Wind''. These 'winds' were ''nourished partly by an oily partly by a watery substance spread over the body residing (in perfect creatures) chiefly in the head running thro' the Nerves refreshd & repaird by the Spiritous part of the blood of the Arterys.'' From this Stukeley was satisfied 'of the existence of what we call Animal Spirits', and believed ancient texts revealed at least some knowledge of this: the Greek physician Hippocrates, for example, 'Says Man & all other animals consist of two parts vizt. fire & water, that is, the vital flame & the blood'.The Advancement of Learning III.3, and De Diaeta L.i.
should be accounted the bellows that keep up the focus by inspiring it with new flame from the Air whence it flows more … lively into the left Auricle of the heart & so distributed to the whole body whence it returns again by the veins to the right Auricle & the lungs of a blacker color having imparted its heat to all the parts & wants afresh to be inspirited.
The lungs, the diaphragm and the thorasic muscles in this system were akin to the bellows in 'seignior Vigani's Chymical Furnaces', further heating the animal spirits already present in the blood and sending it round the body.Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London, 1751), and Stephen Hales's important work on air-pumps and ventilators for ships and prisons.
Previous commentators, he noted, had identified the heart as the seat of the soul, but whilst the heart 'seems to be chief & first Agent' of animal life when it is born, it is the brain which 'Separates the Spirits which move the heart.' Like Galen, Stukeley saw the brain as the body's principal organ, as opposed to Aristotle and Harvey who both considered it to be the heart. This consideration of these two organs led him to the difficult question of sexual reproduction. In mechanical terms, he was not certain of the principal origin of life, for
the Question that Occurs is, which is the First Mover that answers to the Spring of a Watch causing & continuing the regular working of the wheels … truly in this case, I can think no otherwise than that it is the Vital Flame or heat communicated to it from the mother, as one Candle lights another. It seems in this Energetic Process to be the Spark of that Divine Fire which kindles the growing Mass of humors, that by just degrees pervade & stretch themselves out, into all the Members of the Body; as it were a Ray of the Parents Genial Fire, which begins the curious Work & setts the recent Machine agoing.
It was because of this pre-eminent function of the brain that, although it is created at the same time as the heart, 'Nature gives it that extraordinary Magnitude in Embryos'. This would appear to reject that reproductive hypothesis which proposed each sperm carried a fully-formed homunculus that then grew in the womb: as explained by one seventeenth-century physician, once the sperm was situated in the womb the mother 'contributes little else to it, than the earth to the Seed, that's shed or sown in her'.emboîtement) the life force effectively came directly from the man. By contrast, the ovist theory favoured by Harvey and Marcello Malpighi presented the egg as the preformed embryo. Stukeley, however, does not appear to have quite agreed with these alternative preformation theories. He saw life as being conveyed to an inert foetus from the blood of the mother. But this new theory was not without its problems, and Stukeley was puzzled by which embryonic organ started functioning first, the heart or the brain. He decided that they began functioning almost simultaneously, although 'the little brain must first of all separate Spirits from the mothers blood & the little heart move blood not its own till those two become accommodated to each other'.
The Platonists understood all of these matters 'so well', he explained, 'that they always reck[o]ned the head the seat of the soul, wherein is containd the Brain the principle of the animal virtue & motion.' Stukeley believed that the historically recorded phenomena of men (especially those 'of a Superior Genius') appearing to produce light from their bodies could be explained by this theory: 'Thus we are told the head of Alexander the Great sparkled in the heat of the Indian Engagement.'
In Stukeley's system of human animation 'animal spirits' played an important part in explaining the operation of the nerves and muscular motion, a belief common to the Newtonian physicians. How the muscles worked exactly, and how the brain controlled them, was still sketchy at this date. Stukeley considered it 'highly probable' that Descartes was 'in the right when he affirms that every extremity of a nerve has its proper duct in an uninterrupted course reaching up to the Brain'.Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, His Expectations (1749), who worked out in his vibrationist neurophysiology 'a full-blown account of the physical basis of mind.'
Experiments with vacuum pumps had shown the importance of air in sustaining life, and Stukeley believed some aspect of this life-giving animal spirit must be derived directly from the air, and had something to do with Newton's 'elastic fluid' or ether. Indeed, Newton believed that the ether might be similar to, or the same as, animal spirits in the nerves. Whether it was 'the Nitro-aerial substance so learnedly & copiously discussd by Mayow, or the elastic fluid of Sr Isaac Newton' and what its precise 'composition & qualitys' were, Stukeley could not answer. But this 'Animal fire' within us, he was certain, was one with the 'famd Anima or Material Soul' or 'that Divine Spirit within Us' which was derived directly from God. He turned once more to Newton, and the famous passage in Opticks, where Newton wrote of the 'Sensorium'. Stukeley translated this passage thus:
'In Infinite Space as it were in his Sensory sees the things themselves intimately & th[o]roughly percieves them & comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself: Of which things the Images only carryd thro' the Organs of Sense into our little Sensoriums, are there seen & beheld by that which in us perceiv[e]s & thinks.' To deny the existence of the Animal Spirits is to exclude the whole Nervous System & Brain their chief importance.
Stukeley appears to be suggesting that as we live and breath within God's 'Sensorium', through it we are imparted with the very life-giving spirit of the divine, which is taken by the blood from air inhaled into the lungs. A similar argument had already been posited in 1553 by Michael Servetus in his heretical book Christiansimi Restitutio ('The Restitution of Christianity'). Servetus -- who was burnt at the stake in Geneva in the year of the book's publication -- had been interested in how the divine spirit entered man.Genesis suggested that God had breathed the soul into man, and Servetus used his anatomical knowledge to argue that this occurred in the lungs, blood being carried their through the pulmonary artery. Although Servetus' theories had no influence on Harvey, and he is not named by Stukeley, his theory was published in 1694 by William Wootton. Berkeley drew a similar notion to Stukeley from his reading of Newton, and likewise suggested that animal spirits were the result of an 'inferior instrumental cause' which 'is pure æther, fire, or the substance of light which is applied and determined by an infinite mind in the macrocosm or universe, with unlimited power, and according to stated rules'.
Having reached this conclusion, Stukeley observed that if his theory of animal spirits was to be practicable (and provable) it must be 'referable to some particular diseases which may give a light to their Pathology & Method of Cure'. He proposed that one class of ailment which affected muscular motion were diseases of the mind or brain. These included 'Melancholy Madness' and 'Epilepsys', cases in which 'One thing is particularly remarkable', the strength of the muscles of such sufferers, which 'is beyond all Imagination.'Newtonian cure for insanity? It is a shame that he leaves us no answer.
Stukeley presented the results of his anatomical researches to the Royal College of Physicians as well as the Royal Society. On 14, 15 and 16 March 1722 he read the Gulstonian Lectures on the theme of the human spleen at the Royal College's theatre.Of the Spleen, its Description and History, Uses and Diseases, Particularly the Vapors, with their Remedy. It was his first major publication, and his only one in anatomy.
It is significant given the theological direction of his science which we have already encountered, that Stukeley should give his lectures on this subject. James Keill had observed bluntly in his popular treatise the Anatomy of the Humane Body Abridg'd (2nd edition, 1703) that 'The true Use of the Spleen is yet unknown.'Animal Oeconomy (2nd edition, 1717) p. v, that 'The use of the spleen and Vena Porta is now no longer a mystery'. Apparently Keill had reached the opinion that the spleen 'served a function much like that of the portal vein in the production of bile', see Guerrini (1985) p. 257.Wisdom of God, observing that 'The Body of Man may … be proved to be the effect of Wisdom, because there is nothing in it deficient, nothing superfluous, nothing but has its End and Use'. Ray explained that even some purpose could be found for 'the Paps in Men', credulously offering a story he had heard of an Italian man who had weaned his infant child himself when his wife had died. Ray warned his reader that from this example of a practical purpose for men's nipples 'it follows not that they or any other parts of the Body are useless, because we are ignorant.'
No one certainly that has but just dip'd into the anatomy of an animal body, and seen the amazing appearance of inimitable beauty, design and contrivance, thro' every minutest piece and member thereof, would imagine the spleen, boasting of a preheminence of structure, at least that it is inferior to none in the curiosity thereof, should be as it were a casual stroke and fortuitous job of almighty workmanship; but that it has its great uses equal in dignity and necessity with any other. And yet how many good Anatomists, after much pains and useless toil in its consideration, have as in a passion, at last concluded, it had no use or intention at all, and might as well have been omitted in the animal frame.
To discourse of the spleen was, accordingly, a religious exercise, a physician's defence of God's absolute wisdom.
Beginning with the observation that 'The substance of the spleen is different from any thing in the animal machine', Stukeley proceeded to develop his theory that the organ aided digestion. clitoris of the elephant 'is endued with two Muscles like the Erectores in Men.' Roy. Soc. JCB Vol. XII f. 46.
Having established the purpose of the spleen as an organ assisting digestion, Stukeley proceeded to an examination of the causes and cure of 'the Vapors', a melancholy distemper that was associated with the spleen and which 'scholars and ingenious people are more addicted to than others'. A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriak Meloncholy (1729). Unlike Stukeley, Robinson believed that 'the Ancients suppos'd, very erroneously, that Hypochondriak Melancholy arose in Men, from an Indisposition of the Spleen [i.e. the gland itself]'.Essay on Health and Long Life (1724) and The English Malady (1733) illustrate, this was a period much concerned with the medical treatment of depressive disorders such as 'the spleen'. In his preface to the latter book Cheyne, a Scot, explained that its title came from
a Reproach universally thrown on this Island by Foreigners, and all our Neighbours on the Continent, by whom nervous Distempers, Spleen, Vapours, and Lowness of Spirits, are in Derision, called the ENGLISH MALADY. And I wish there were not so good Grounds for this Reflection. The Moisture of our Air, the Variableness of our Weather (from our Situation amidst the Ocean), the Rankness and Fertility of our Soil, the Richness and Heaviness of our Food, the Wealth and Abundance of the Inhabitants (from their universal Trade), the Inactivity and sedentary Occupations of the better Sort (among whom this Evil mostly rages) and the Humour of living in great, populous and consequently unhealthy Towns, have brought forth a Class and Set of Distempers, with atrocious and frightful Symptoms, scarce known to our Ancestors, and never rising to such fatal Heights, nor afflicting such Numbers in any other known Nation. These nervous Disorders being computed to make almost one third of the Complaints of the People of Condition in England.
Cheyne, who had himself enjoyed -- and suffered -- mightily from over-indulgence in food and wine whilst living in London, was not alone it attributing the cause of these distempers to the weather, rich urban living and lethargy. In Of the Spleen Stukeley likewise criticized the luxurious modern English lifestyle. This was the seat of his countrymen's ills: 'Our leaving the country for cities and great towns, coffeehouses and domestic track of business, our sedate life and excesses together, have prepar'd a plentiful harvest for these disorders. The remedy therefore is obvious; and without the concurrence of chearfulness, exercise, open air and conversation, all medicine is impotent'.
Unfortunately, we know very little about the reception of Stukeley's work on the spleen. In 1725 an unknown gentleman told Thomas Hearne that the book was 'much commended … as having very nice and exact Cuts.' However Hearne was a Jacobite and had already taken a dislike to Stukeley, a latitudinarian Whig, who, he wrote in his diary in 1722, was 'a very fancifull man … He is looked upon as a man of no great authority, and his reputation dwindles every day, as I have learned from very good hands'. When they actually met in Oxford in September 1724 Hearne would describe Stukeley as 'a mighty conceited man'.Of the Spleen, Hearne got his informant to admit that though Stukeley 'had some skill … he was far from a topping or eminent Physician.'Goliath of our Art'. Ever the historian, he even found evidence for its antiquity in the pages of the Old Testament.Stukeley,' it observed, 'every body allows him to be of the first class of physicians in England'.v and Bod. MS Eng. misc. e. 138 ff. 19-20.
We can conclude our discussion of Stukeley's anatomical and medical interests with the brief work which was appended to Of the Spleen, his 'Essay Towards the Anatomy of the Elephant, from one Dissected at Fort St. George Oct. 1715, and another at London Oct. 1720'. This paper had first been presented at a meeting of the Royal Society on 20 October 1720, and gave a detailed account of a dissection undertaken with Sloane of an elephant, brought from the East India Company's factory at Bencoolen in Sumatra. The elephant had been publicly exhibited in London, but its ultimate demise had been 'heightened by the great quantity of ale the spectators continually gave it.'Phocaena, Or, The Anatomy of a Porposs Dissected at Gresham College; With a Preliminary Discourse Concerning Anatomy, And a Natural History of Animals (1680); Carigueya, seu Marsupiale Americanum; Or, The Anatomy of an Opossum Dissected at Gresham College (1698); Orang-Outang, Sive Homo Sylvestris: Or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape and a Man (1699). The ancient Greek physician Galen (AD 131-201) in De Usu Partium described the anatomy of the elephant and drew upon Aristotle's description of the animal, but it does not appear that Stukeley had read Galen's work on the subject.Opticks, that small particles of bodies were also capable of working at a distance:
For if there be a certain terminus in the atoms or first particles of substance, as we may gather from Sir Isaac Newton's optics, so that its powers have an extent beyond which they cannot well go; then is it reasonably to be suppos'd, that their combinations and effects have somewhat different turns, as to the action and composition of animalcules, in respect of the larger loco-motive productions of the creation.
Even in his dissection of animals, then, Stukeley used Newtonian philosophy and analogy as sources for understanding and explaining the natural world, hoping at the same time to contribute to the improvement of that philosophy. It incidentally also reflects his particular fascination with the difference between the anatomy of very large and very small animals. He had noted in his 'Creation' manuscript Leuwenhook's examination of the nerve fibres of a whale, and his 'very surprizing' conclusion 'that the last degree of fibrils he might possibly discover were really finer & more slender than those in a Moth.' Stukeley explained this by the fact that 'these Great Creatures have [such] a prodigious Power of Gravitation' constantly to overcome, that 'their moving Engines require more curiosity of Workmanship.' In comparison to elephants, spiders and flys were so little affected by gravity as to have 'legs 10 times longer that their whole body which they manage with Admirable agility'.
The elephant also allowed him to further explore his interest in the problem of reproduction. From his dissection of the female's genitalia, and from what he had read of the dissection of male specimens, Stukeley drew the conclusion that elephants must mate with the female lying on her back, 'more humano', for 'it is certain and demonstrable from the known situation of the female parts, that the coitus can never be performed more brutorum'.English Dictionary entry for the elephant, 'In copulation the female receives the male lying upon her back'.