182 Heilbron
Göttingen Societät der Wissenschaften, “or inevitably betray his naked-
ness.” Ordinary teachers, “those who aspire only to be professors,” faced
no such danger.^25
Universities tended to oppose the establishment of academies in their
neighborhoods for fear of challenges to their authority. The Hollandsche
Maatschappij knew that well. The University of Leiden had opposed its
founding. The professors claimed that the Royal Society had undercut the
prestige of Oxford and Cambridge and that the University of Paris had
hardly been heard from since the foundation of the Paris Academy of
Sciences. Relations were much better in Bologna, where professors could
be seconded to paid posts in the Accademia delle scienze, and Göttingen,
where leading professors also belonged to the Societät der Wissenschaften.
Some professors elsewhere added their bits to knowledge with the help of
administrators eager to demonstrate their enlightenment. The English-
Hanoverian administration practiced such a policy toward the Univer-
sity of Göttingen almost from its foundation in 1737 as did the Austrian
government of Lombardy toward the University of Pavia after 1770. The
most fruitful contributions to natural philosophy made in Italy in the
later eighteenth century came from Bologna, where Galvani worked as
a professor and academician, and Pavia, where Volta enjoyed something
like the life of a modern professor, with research grants, a good budget for
instruments, and expenses for foreign travel.^26 A quantitative indicator of
the increasing identifi cation of physics professors with their subject and
its advancement can be given for Protestant Germany. During the fi rst
quarter of the eighteenth century, three- fourths of those who held chairs
of physics left them for other careers, usually in medicine. During the last
quarter, three- fourths made their entire careers teaching, and sometimes
also adding to, physics.^27
In addition to salaried academicians and professors who did some re-
search, full- time natural philosophers might be found in observatories,
botanical gardens, and chemical laboratories. The number engaged in re-
search increased after 1750 as the pace of foundation of the institutions
most closely associated with the creation of new knowledge in natural
philosophy—the academy and the observatory—stepped up. The number
of fellow travelers on the ark of science also grew: the reporters of mar-
vels, witnesses of demonstrations, supporters of academies, observers of
weather, authors of systems, agricultural improvers, natural theologians,
collectors, inventors, hobbyists, and, not least, sharpers and charlatans.
This throng included many who called themselves natural philosophers.
And who could deny them the title? No formal criteria for enrollment