When we think of notebooks and science, the modern hardbound and gridded laboratory journal comes to mind. With its entries written in pen, its pages numbered sequentially, these little volumes are designed so that all data and experimental results are recorded faithfully and accurately. That is the lofty intent, at any rate. When I was a scientist, my own notebook featured columns of data, smudges of crystal violet or safranin dye, and photographs of ghostly electrophoresis bands to determine the components of a macromolecule at a glance. The humanist commonplace notebook of the sixteenth century, on the other hand, had an equally lofty intent: to stockpile memorable phrases from the Classics to adorn one's own writing – Ciceronian tropes rather than microscopes.

When assessing the rise of experimental science in the seventeenth century, it has often been assumed that the humanist note-taking mentality became extinct. After all, reading was out, and direct observation was in. Not so. As Yeo's recent book shows us, early modern virtuosi employed notebooks just as much as their humanist predecessors, if not more so. It was not for nothing that the Royal Society's flagship journal, the Philosophical Transactions, was, in the words of its secretary Henry Oldenburg, a series of ‘philosophical commonplace books' (see, for this description, his letter to René Sluse of 2 April 1669). The virtuosi still had the humanist impulse to relieve and prompt memory, but they experimented not only with elements of the natural world, but with new ways of organizing and recalling information.

There was, after all, so much more information to sort and remember. Flora and fauna from the New World created vast reservoirs of empirical data to organize, and the botanist John Ray knew ‘that lost notes meant lost information’ (p. 231). To cope with the onslaught, John Locke created a ‘hybrid form of notebook in which entries made in chronological order were given marginal Heads that served as keywords for an index to each journal’ (p. 197). Robert Hooke kept a detailed weather diary, and, not entirely surprisingly, by the 1680s, his colleague Martin Lister invented the histogram as a new way of visualizing barometric pressure.

And the early modern English natural philosophers also had to consider their notes not just as personal carriers of information or memory prompts, but as serving collaborative purposes, as ‘detailed records that could be understood by others' (p. 171). As Yeo has shown, this was a particular challenge for the nascent Royal Society. What was one to do with such a paper archive, and what was to be the location, arrangement and administration of the papers containing, in Thomas Sprat's words, ‘a mixt Mass of Experiments' (p. 236)?

In a fascinating analysis, Yeo elucidates how Robert Hooke as Royal Society secretary addressed these two challenges. He first investigated the capacity of human memory, positing that any instruments that enhanced the senses, such as the microscope, must also be supplemented by intellectual reformation that extended to better recollection. With his penchant for subjecting his own body to chemical experiments, one might think that Hooke would think natural memory could be enhanced artificially, but no. Instead he attempted to invent a method to ensure that the information that the memory absorbed could be recollected when desired, using elements from Francis Bacon's methods for natural histories and John Wilkins's universal language scheme. Hooke then tried to create a dynamic archive that would faithfully record scientific enterprise, unfortunately with a ‘mixt’ result that Sprat did not intend. Hooke simply ‘treated the Society's Journal-books as an extension of his own notes' (p. 237). As is well known, the journal books, collectively known as the Hooke Folio, were not found again until 2006, in Hampshire, in the back of a cupboard. Oh dear.

But whatever the power or failure of an archive, for the English virtuosi no archive could replace disciplined note-taking. Good notes about sharp observations enhanced the chances of intellectual breakthrough. Yeo has shown us the intellectual origins of the laboratory notebook in the humanist notebook, putting paid, yet again, to the artificial dichotomies of the ‘two cultures' of the sciences and the humanities. If just for that, his book is a very welcome addition to the literature and highly recommended.