As already implied, the Royal Society was not exclusive in its attitude toward the different vocations. A spirit of true fellowship prevailed in Gresham College, as the Society was sometimes called. The medical profession, the universities, the churches, the court, the army, the navy, trade, agriculture, and other industries were there represented. Social partition walls were broken down, and the Fellows, sobered by years of political and religious strife, joined, mutually assisting one another, in the advance of science for the sake of the common weal. Their express purpose was the improvement of all professions from the highest general to the lowest artisan. Particular attention was paid to the trades, the mechanic arts, and the fostering of inventions. One of their eight committees dealt with the histories of trades; another was concerned with mechanical inventions, and the king ordained in 1662 that no mechanical device should receive a patent before undergoing their scrutiny. A great many inventions emanated from the Fellows themselves--Hooke's hygroscope; Boyle's hydrometer, of use in the detection of counterfeit coin; and, again, the tablet anemometer used by Sir Christopher Wren (the Leonardo da Vinci of his age) to register the velocity of the wind. A third committee devoted itself to agriculture, and in the Society's museum were collected products and curiosities of the shop, mine, sea, etc. One Fellow advised that attention should be paid even to the least and plainest of phenomena, as otherwise they might learn the romance of nature rather than its true history. So bent were they on preserving a spirit of simplicity and straightforwardness that in their sober discussions they sought to employ the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants rather than that of wits and scholars.
Of course there was in the Society a predominance of gentlemen of means and leisure, "free and unconfined." Their presence was thought to serve a double purpose. It checked the tendency to sacrifice the search of truth to immediate profit, and to lay such emphasis on application, as, in the words of a subsequent president of the Society, would make truth, and wisdom, and knowledge of no importance for their own sakes. In the second place their presence was held to check dogmatism on the part of the leaders, and subservience on the part of their followers. They understood how difficult it is to transmit knowledge without putting initiative in jeopardy and that quiet intellect is easily dismayed in the presence of bold speech. The Society accepted the authority of no one, and adopted as its motto _Nullius in Verba_.