Three hundred and fifty years ago, London's recently formed Royal Society - the body at the heart of the Enlightenment - published its first book. It was written not by Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton or any of the other luminaries of seventeenth-century experimental philosophy, but by another founding member of the society: the prodigious public servant John Evelyn (1620-1706). And its subject was not anatomy, astronomy, chemistry or optics, but forestry. Sylva is a practical treatise on silviculture and an enduring classic, published in four editions during Evelyns lifetime and posthumously in a further six, up until 1825.
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