1677

1671 1672 1673 1674 1675 1676 1677 1678 1679 1680

political events

Juan José de Austria drives Spain's queen regent Maria from court early in the year along with her favorite Fernande Valenzuela (see 1669). Now 47, Don Juan makes himself chief minister, but his arrogance, paranoia, and indulgence in intrigue at the expense of the common weal makes him thoroughly unpopular. Spain's territorial empire covers much of the known world, but her soil is barely cultivated, her food costly, and her population dwindling. Spain has become a third-rate power (see 1613).

France's duc d'Orléans defeats the Dutch at Cassel.

A Dutch-Danish fleet under the command of Niels Juel defeats a Swedish fleet at the Bay of Koge in the ongoing Scanian War (see 1676).

The Dutch stadholder Willem of Orange turns 27 November 4 and is married that day at London to the duke of York's 15-year-old daughter Mary, a niece of England's Charles II. Charles's chief minister Thomas Osborne, 45, earl of Danby, has engineered the marriage to effect an alliance with France's chief opponent on the Continent, but Danby acts on the king's orders to obtain a secret yearly subsidy from Louis XIV (see 1678).

human rights, social justice

French forces in Africa take Dutch ports on the Senegal River and capture Gorée near Cape Verde October 30. Gorée will be a major port for the slave trade (see 1698).

commerce

England and France sign a maritime agreement permitting English ships to carry Dutch cargoes without fear of French interference.

Culpeper's Rebellion in the 14-year-old Carolina colony protests enforcement of English trade laws by the colony's proprietors. Rebellious colonists install surveyor John Culpeper as governor, but the proprietors will remove him in 1679.

science

Mathematician, classical scholar, and theologian Isaac Barrow dies at his native London May 4 at age 46, having developed a way of determining tangents that anticipated the methods of calculus, which he taught to his pupil Isaac Newton.

medicine

Physician Richard Lower, now 46, introduces direct blood transfusion from one animal into the veins of another (see 1667). He has injected dark venous blood into the lungs and deduced that air turns blood red (see 1818).

The London Pharmacopeia of 1618 appears in a third edition that includes steel tonics, digitalis, benzoin, jalap, ipecacuanha, cinchona bark (see Barba, 1642), and Irish whisky (acqua vitae Hibernoroium sive usquebaugh).

religion

The Ukrainian Catholic metropolitanate of Lvov gives up its opposition to the 1596 Union of Brest-Litovsk and joins the union (see Przemyshl, 1692).

literature

Philosopher Baruch de Spinoza dies at The Hague February 21 at age 43, leaving his Tractatus Politicus incomplete; political philosopher James Harrington dies at London September 11 at age 66 (imprisoned in the early 1660s on a dubious charge of plotting against the restored monarchy of Charles II, he suffered permanent impairment of his physical and mental health before being released).

art

Painting: Musical Party in a Courtyard by Pieter de Hooch.

theater, film

Theater: Phaedra (Phèdre) by Jean Racine 1/1 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, Paris; The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers (parts I and II) by Aphra Behn at Duke's House, Dorset Gardens, London; All for Love, or The World Well Lost by John Dryden in December at London's Drury Lane Theatre.

music

Italian violinist-composer Arcangelo Corelli, 24, sends his Sonata for Violin and Lute to Count Fabrizio Laderchi of Faenza June 3. Corelli has been second violinist since last year in the orchestra at Rome's chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi and now begins a notable career as composer.

environment

France's Louis XIV sets aside a 20-acre field and commissions Jean de La Quintinie to create an orchard and vegetable garden to feed the court. The garden is to have walls, terraces, and greenhouses with espaliered apple and pear trees, and the greenhouses are expected to provide peas in winter, asparagus and strawberries in March.

agriculture

French planters establish cacao plantations in Brazil to provide Parisian cocoa grinders with a good supply of the beans for aristocracy's favorite beverage. Portuguese planters in the Amazon basin find labor scarce. There are severe shortages of river transport, and although the Brazilian port of Para will be exporting 1,000 tons of cacao beans by the end of the next century, most of it will still be cacao collected from wild trees (cacao bravo).

population

Microscopic spermatozoa in human semen are found by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and L. Hamm at Delft (see medicine, 1675).

1671 1672 1673 1674 1675 1676 1677 1678 1679 1680

Astronomy

On November 7, Edmond Halley makes the first complete observation of a transit of Mercury. See also 1676 Astronomy.

In November Anton van Leeuwenhoek confirms the discovery of sperm by Louis Dominicus Hamm. Unlike Hamm, who thinks sperm are evidence of disease, Leeuwenhoek concludes that sperm are the sources of reproduction, the larvae of humans (since Leeuwenhoek did not know of the mammalian egg, he did not propose fertilization). See also 1673 Tools; 1680 Biology.

Johann Kunckel [b. Hutten (Germany), 1630, d. Dreissighufen (Germany), March 1703] describes an aqueous solution of ammonia. See also 1695 Chemistry.

Robert Plot [b. Borden, Kent, England, December 1640, d. 1696] in The Natural History of Oxfordshire describes, with illustrations, a "real bone now petrified"; he suspects it to be an elephant bone brought to England by the Romans. It is later (1824) shown to be a dinosaur bone from a Megalosaurus, one of the first dinosaur bones known to science. See also 1822 Earth science.

Leibniz correctly determines the quotient rule for differentiation.

Nonfiction

• Daniel Gookin: An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677. In marked contrast to the histories of King Philip's War written by William Hubbard and Increase Mather, Gookin reveals the injustices, imprisonment, and murder of the "Praying Indians" (Indians who had converted to Christianity) during the conflict.
• William Hubbard: Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England. In this popular account of King Philip's War, the historian and clergyman makes it clear who he believes is to blame for the recent conflict, calling the Indians "treacherous villains" and the "dross of mankind."
• Increase Mather: A Relation of the Troubles Which Have Hapned in New-England, By Reason of the Indians there.... Mather's second Indian history is a litany of Indian atrocities and betrayals, typifying the feelings of many colonists during the period.
• Thomas Thacher (1620-1678): A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People of New-England How to Order Themselves and Theirs in the Small Pocks, or Measels. Thacher, not a physician but "a well-wisher to the sick," issues the first medical treatise published in America. Addressing the 1677 epidemic that killed at least seven hundred, Thacher gives advice based on Thomas Sydenham's research in England. The book would become one of the best-known texts in New England, reprinted during subsequent epidemics in 1702 and 1721.

Poetry, Fiction, and Drama

• Urian Oakes: "Elegie Upon the Death of the Reverend Mr. Thomas Shepard." Oakes's single published poem is one of the most praised by an American colonial poet. He interprets Shepard's death at the age of forty-two from smallpox as divine punishment, stating that "Our sins have slain our Shepard! We have bought, / And dearly paid for, our Enormities."

Sermons and Religious Writing

• Sarah Symmes Fiske (1652-1692): A Confession of Faith: or, A Summary of Divinity. Drawn Up By a Young Gentle-Woman, in the Twenty-Fifth Year of Her Age. Fiske's well-written and only known literary work is composed in 1677 but would not be published until 1704. The work is a spiritual biography that emphasizes Puritan theology and argument, an uncommon topic for a woman at the time.
• Samuel Hooker (1635-1697): Righteousness Rained from Heaven. The son of Thomas Hooker delivers this jeremiad to Connecticut voters, decrying the "declension" of the current generation from the founders' piety.

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