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PLOT, ROBERT (b. Borden, Kent, England,
13 December 1640; d. Borden, 30 April 1696), natural
history, archaeology, chemistry.
Of all the British naturalists of the late seventeenth
century, few represent the omnivorous curiosity of the
Baconian tradition and its passion for collecting
specimens and observations for their own sake so well
as Robert Plot. The son of Robert Plot and Elisabeth
Patenden, he was educated at the Wye Free School and
at Oxford, which he entered in 1658, graduating B.A.
in 1661, M.A. in 1664, and LL.D. in 1671. For many
years he served as a college tutor. About 1674 he drew
up an itinerary patterned on those of earlier English
antiquaries; but whereas they had been concerned with
books and buildings to the exclusion of natural history
and technology, Plot intended to tour England and
Wales in search of “all curiosities both of Art and
Nature such . . . as transcend the ordinary performances
of the one and are out of the ordinary Road of
the other.” He began with the county in which he was
then living, starting work on his Natural History of
Oxfordshire in June 1674; by November 1675 he had a
fine collection of minerals to exhibit to the Royal
Society, and the book appeared in 1677. On the
strength of the Natural History, Plot was elected fellow
of the Royal Society in 1677. He was secretary in
1682-1684 and thus joint editor of the Philosophical
Transactions, most of which were printed at Oxford
during his term of office; he was elected secretary again
in 1692. His success as a collector of rarities must also
have helped when, in March 1683, the University of
Oxford appointed him first keeper of the newly
acquired Ashmolean Museum.
At the same time there was to be an Ashmolean
professor of chemistry, with a laboratory in the
museum, equipped at great expense; Plot was chosen
for this post too. In this field his researches were
dominated by the hunt for a wonderful menstruum, to
be extracted from spirits of wine, which could act as a
general solvent. Since no adequate funds had been set
aside to pay salaries, the professor and his assistant
supplemented their incomes by making up iatrochemical
drugs. Although Plot did not believe in
transmutation in the old sense--it was “but a kind of
dying” and it would be sufficient to achieve “a fixt
penetrating colour”--he held that the methods of
alchemy were essential for true medicine. The
medicinal springs of Oxfordshire were subjected to
analysis by methods taken from the work of Boyle and
Thomas Willis.
With his new dual position at Oxford, Plot had to
give up his offices in the Royal Society, although he
continued to supply it with specimens from his travels.
In 1684 he helped to revive the Oxford Philosophical
Society and became its director of experiments.
Meanwhile, although he had abandoned his plan to
survey the whole country, Plot was invited to resume
his explorations, this time in Staffordshire, the natural
history of which he published in 1686. He subsequently
concentrated more on archaeology, searching in
particular for Roman remains. In 1690 he resigned all
his Oxford posts, married Rebecca Burman of London,
and settled on his ancestral estate, Sutton Baron. Two
more natural histories, of Kent and Middlesex, were
never completed. In the summer of 1695 he began to
suffer severely from calculi; by September he was
sufficiently recovered to go on an archaeological tour