It has been said that the Royal Society of the eighteenth century was in decline. The ground-breaking experimentation of the Restoration period was long gone, to be followed by talk rather than action, and the pages of Philosophical Transactions were filled with papers by provincial clergymen on natural curiosities and antiquities. But the links between the Royal Society and the Spalding Gentlemen's Society (SGS)—founded in 1712 and still in existence as the country's longest-lived provincial learned society—show a connection not just between city and country, but between scientific and antiquarian research, fields that had not yet assumed their distinct modern forms. A fruitful correspondence existed between the two societies for several decades in the first half of the century, and a number of Fellows (including Newton) became honorary members of the SGS. In this article, I show that the SGS did not simply rely on its metropolitan connections for intellectual sustenance, but rather, that this joint association allowed it to flourish as a dynamic society that cultivated international networks.

据说 18 世纪的皇家学会正在衰落。复辟时期开创性的实验早已一去不复返，随之而来的是空谈而不是行动，《哲学汇刊》的页面满是省级牧师关于自然奇观和古物的论文。但皇家学会与斯伯丁绅士学会 (SGS) 之间的联系——成立于 1712 年，作为该国历史最悠久的省级学术团体仍然存在——表明不仅城市与乡村之间存在联系，而且科学与古物研究之间也存在联系，尚未采用其独特的现代形式的领域。在本世纪上半叶，两个学会之间存在了数十年的富有成果的往来，一些院士（包括牛顿）成为了 SGS 的名誉会员。在这篇文章中，我展示了 SGS 并不仅仅依靠其与大都市的联系来提供智力支持，而是，