1682 in science

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009)

The year 1682 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Astronomy

• A comet is observed, which later becomes known as Comet Halley, after Edmund Halley successfully predicts its return in 1758.

Discoveries

• Antony Van Leeuwenhoek discovers the banded pattern of muscle fibers.

Botany

• John Ray publishes his Methodus plantarum nova, which sets out his system to divide flowering plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons.

Exploration

• René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle canoes down the Mississippi River, naming the Mississippi basin Louisiana in honour of Louis XIV.

Medicine

• English naval surgeon James Yonge (1646–1721) publishes Wounds of the Brain Proved Curable, probably the first monograph in English on surgery of the head.

Births

• February 25 - Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist (died 1771)
• March 24 - Mark Catesby, English naturalist (died 1749)
• July 10 - Roger Cotes, English mathematician (died 1716)

Deaths

• July 12 - Jean Picard, French astronomer (born 1620)
• October - J. J. Becher, German physician and chemist (born 1635)