Interesting paragraph of an article I’m reading…,
This was exactly the (eiie employed, initially under the coordinating supervision of John Locke, to develop the British Royal Society, and launch the Scottish Encyclopedia Britannica. lt is now documented that Isaac Newton made not a single original useful contribution to scientific knowledge. In fact, he was almost fully occupied with his efforts to master “black magic” — as the surviving archives show him to — have been actually engaged at the time his associates later fraudulently alleged him to have developed his calculus. (9) Insofar as Newton (and Boyle) drew their materials from English sources, this involved not only appropriating as their own work of Wallis and Barrow, but shamelessly and repeatedly plagiarizing the work of Hooke. Newton’s physics was, in the main obtained through Hooke’s completing the mathematization of the discoveries already completed by William Gilbert, Kepler, and Galileo, and adding in the discovery (inertia) contributed by Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz and Huygens were among the contemporaries most frequently plagiarized by the Royal Society during that period. Rightly could Newton inscribe his Principia, “hypothesis is not necessary”; what need has a plagiarist of hypothesis? However, the slogan, “hypothesis is not necessary” has another significance. Like Aristotle’s Peripatetics, the purpose of the Royal Society’s circulation of scientific works was to eliminate scientific progress, by outlawing the principle of rigorously formulated crucial hypothesis (ritually denounced as ‘‘metaphysics’’) in favor of that banalizing doctrine known as "the principle of the inductive sciences.”
Such antiscientific literary undertakings aside, the principal empirical pursuit of the Peripatetics in matters of knowledge was the subject of botany. This is the one aspect of Aristotle’s writings which stands out as having some explicit content of interest in the development of knowledge. Why the exception in this case? The interest in botany was essentially political, in a manner of speaking. The specialty of the Peripatetic assassins was poisoning.