So, on that November afternoon 1660, in Gresham College, a new Society was formed. It was arranged that its “original members” were to be those present, with some others then and there proposed as eligible, thirty-nine names being suggested and written down. Among them were John Evelyn, Dr. Wallis, Dr. Seth Ward, Dr. Willis, Dr. Bathurst, Sir Kenelm Digby, Abraham Cowley, John Denham, Mr. William Croone, Mr. Richard Jones, and Henry Oldenburg. Robert Boyle’s influence was already making itself felt. Most of these men were Oxford colleagues, personal friends, and old Invisibles. The last three must have been his special nominations, and two of them were his own kinsmen. Dick Jones, his hopeful nephew, had just returned with Henry Oldenburg from their foreign tour. William Croone, who was nominated _in absentia_ for the post of Registrar of the Society, was presumably a son of the old Earl of Cork’s “Cozen Croone”, the vintner of the King’s Head in Cheapside;[263] because the “Croonian Lecture Fund,” long afterwards bequeathed to the Royal Society by Mr. Croone’s widow, was derived from “one fifth of the clear rent of the King’s Head Tavern in or near old Fish Street, London, at the corner of Lambeth Hill.”[264] This makes William Croone a cousin of Robert Boyle’s; and he was a creditable relative, this heir of old Cozen Croone the vintner, for he was afterwards Doctor of Physic and Gresham Professor of Rhetoric; and the Royal Society owes its Croonian Lecture Fund to his and his widow’s generosity, and to the takings at the old King’s Head in Cheapside. Other original members—they were afterwards “Fellows”—were added at later meetings. And what a list it was! There was Aubrey of the “Lives,” and Ashmole, of museum celebrity, and Dryden and Waller the poets, and old Haak the originator of the Invisible College, and Robert Hooke, whose services at Oxford Boyle amiably dispensed with so that he might be Curator,[265] and Peter Pett the Naval Commissioner, and Thomas Sprat, the Society’s enthusiastic first biographer, and Governor Winthrop from Connecticut, and Isaac Barrow the scholarly divine,[266] and John Graunt, the “tradesman” who drew up the Bills of Mortality. Peers there were in plenty,—the Duke of Buckingham and the Earls of Devonshire, Northampton, and Sandwich, among them; and Bishops—present and future. Doctors of Physic, of course, and Lawyers of the Temple; Churchmen, Statesmen, Army-men, Navy-men, and City-men. “It is to be noted,” says Sprat, “that they have freely admitted men of different Religions, Countries, and Professions of Life. This they were obliged to do, or else they would come far short of the largeness of their own declarations. For they openly profess not to lay the foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish, or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of _Mankind_.”[267]