On the track between field and forest, the solitary horseman moved slowly. He rode looking downwards, eyes and head traversing, keenly searching shrub and fern, tree and flower for all and anything new, different and unusual. Every now and then he would stop, dismount even, to examine more closely a stone, a stream, an insect. In his travel pack and saddle-bags a spade and pick accompanied clothes and provisions. Collecting bottles, chemicals, a compass and other mathematical instruments were carefully packed against the shocks of the route, notebooks and loose papers were equally carefully protected from dust and damp.

The time is the decade of the 1670s, the place anywhere on the bridleways of the southern and Midland counties of England. The horseman is Robert Plot perambulating England in order to record its curiosities of art and nature. Fascinated by antiquities and the past, intoxicated by the marvels of the natural world, Plot has understood that natural products could be exploited far more fully than hitherto. He has also understood that what man makes with the materials nature offers, his arts and inventions, machines and models, paintings and drawings, are also a part of the environment in which he lives. Plot has set out to record the natural history of England in all its variety.

This year marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Plot who, as the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and Professor of Chemistry, spent much of his working life in the Old Ashmolean, the building that now houses the Museum of the History of Science. He was born in December 1640 at Sutton Barne in the parish of Borden, near Sittingbourne, Kent and was baptized there on the 13th of the same month. His family had been established in the region since the fifteenth century.

Educated at the Free School in Wye, Plot entered Magdalen Hall on the 24th March 1658, matriculated in the University on the 2nd July, and graduated B.A. in 1661 and M.A. in 1664. After 1664 he stayed on at Magdalen Hall, where he held the posts of Dean and of Vice-Principal, teaching - the name of one of his pupils, Matthew Bryan, is known for 1665 - and preparing his B.C.L. and D.C.L., both of which he took in 1671.

It was during these years of teaching and study that Plot must have laid the foundation of the formidable erudition that earnt him the sobriquet 'learned Dr Plot'. He also acquired practical skills such as elementary land-surveying and the operations of chemistry.

In 1667 Plot followed a course in practical chemistry given by William Wilden, and he was a young observer and participant in the activities of the group of natural philosophers that congregated around Robert Boyle at Deep Hall until 1668, and thereafter around Thomas Willis at Beam Hall in St John's Street. At Beam Hall not only did Plot become imbued with a deep and lasting fascination for the new sciences, but he also made acquaintances whose names and influence would later be helpful to him.

Other settings were also valuable to Plot. At Magdalen Hall he belonged to a society which was home to a series of geographical writers during the seventeenth century, and which held an important collection of geographical works in its library. At Magdalen Hall too, Plot continued to be in the company of his erstwhile tutor, Josiah Pullen (1631-1714) from whom he may have acquired his taste for antiquities.

The writings of Francis Bacon had an influence on Plot, but behind his Baconian rhetoric can be found the more fundamental influence of the antiquarian writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - the chorographers - who had begun to write the survey of Britain county by county. Behind them, permeating Plot's whole approach and his writings, was also the humanist-classical tradition mediated through the Historia naturalis of Pliny.

Plot, it is not too great an exaggeration to say, saw himself as a latter-day Pliny. In about 1670, perhaps earlier, he drew up a long outline of a 'plan for a survey of Britain in search of natural and artificial curiosities, knowledge of which could improve the pleasure, the knowledge and the commerce of man.' Plot's model for this, he explicitly states, was Pliny. To Pliny he added the rhetoric and the utilitarianism of Baconianism and the concentration on a local unit and interest in antiquities of the antiquarians William Camden (1551-1623) and John Leland (1506?-1552).

Plot managed to win sufficient financial support for his project so that, in 1674, he could set off on nearly two years of travel and writing about the natural curiosities of England. By mid-1676 he had finished his first essay in the genre, The Natural History of Oxfordshire.

The success of Plot's Natural History was immediate. It 'took' with the reading public and was approved of by his scholarly peers. Already in June 1677 there was talk in the Univer sity of creating a special lecture for Plot to expound 'philosophicall history'. By this was meant the development of reasoned explan ations of unusual natural phenomena and controverted subjects.

In the event, this plan became involved in the project developed by the University's governors as they negotiated with Elias Ashmole the bequest of his collections. The core of Ashmole's collection, derived from that of the father and son John Tradescant, was of natural specimens, although to them Ashmole himself had added medals, coins, antiquities, books, manuscripts, and heraldic and genealogical collections.

In its entirety the collection provided an excellent assembly of specimens similar to those that Plot himself had for some time been collecting, and over which he could exercise his explanatory skills. Between 1679 and 1683 an imposing building was erected next to the Bodleian Library and the Sheldonian Theatre (a visible central core of University buildings was being created), to house Ashmole's museum, a lecture hall and a chemical laboratory. Plot was appointed to give life to the whole as both Keeper of Ashmole's Musæum and as Professor of Chemistry.

Plot was energetic and productive in his double post. During the seven years in office he wrote and published two books (although one, it must be admitted, was only a Latin translation of part of the other), founded and animated the Oxford Philosophical Society, lectured on chemistry, augmented the Ashmolean collection, and for two years acted as Secretary of the Royal Society of London, editing the Philosophical Transactions.

His major achievement during this period was the completion of his Natural History of Staffordshire which was published in 1686. The county was no doubt chosen to please Ashmole, but the book was intended to be the second instalment of Plot's survey of England. It is a more mature and readable book than Oxfordshire, although no less learned and no less committed to finding phenomena and practices, knowledge of which might be useful to others. Even so, the book is far more philosophical, the explanations of the reasons of things longer, more wide-ranging and more trenchant.

Plot has sometimes been accused of being credulous, mainly on the strength of an unsubstantiated remark in an early nineteenth-century source. In reality he was simply typical of his times. If his belief in pharmaceutical alchemy now seems misplaced, it was no more than old-fashioned in contemporary terms. It is perhaps to be linked with a tendency on Plot's part towards Catholicism and towards an older world view than the apparent modernity of his books would suggest.

Rather than credulity, the fault that might be found with Plot is ambition linked with greed. As a collector he was clearly somewhat grasping, with a reputation, if stories recorded by Thomas Hearne are to be believed, for not returning antiquities and specimens leant to him for study.

It was ambition (as well as marriage) which also seems to have led to Plot's resignation from the Museum. Already in 1687 he tried to obtain the Wardenship of All Souls. This may have resulted from a recognition that having failed to obtain the royal patronage for which he had angled in the dedications of his Oxfordshire and Staffordshire volumes to Charles II and James II, the Keepership of the Ashmolean Museum offered no great promise of further advancement.

Despite stating at the end of Staffordshire that he intended to write no more county histories, it is clear that Plot's commitment to such works never entirely waned, for he projected surveys of Kent and of London and Middlesex, issuing questionnaires and subscription proposals for them. Nonetheless in the last ten years of his life he concentrated more seriously on antiquarian, particularly genealogical and heraldic studies, than on those of natural history.

To some extent the move was successful. In 1687 Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk, a patron whom Plot had presented for an honorary doctorate at Oxford in 1684, made him Registrar of the Court of Chivalry. In 1688 he was made Historiographer Royal only to lose the post the following year in the wake of the Orangist succession. In January 1695 the office of Mowbray Herald Extraordinary was created for him, and two days later he was given the place of Registrar of the College of Heralds by the Earl Marshal.

That in 1694 Plot was nonetheless at work on the Natural History of London and Middlesex may not be unconnected with the fact that a bevy of influential men had subscribed towards it. Like Plot's own hopes however, those of the subscribers would be disappointed, for on the 30th April 1696 Plot died after suffering sufficiently greatly for the fact to be recorded on the memorial plaque erected to his memory in Borden Church.

Stone, however, was not Robert Plot's true monument. A man of contradictions, time-serving but committed to the subjects of his research; ambitious but also concerned to be useful; grasping, on occasion arousing the ire of his colleagues, but nonetheless of convivial disposition, bibulous and jovial, Plot's importance lies in the way that his early work dove-tailed with the interests of a wide range of country gentry who were willing, even eager, to participate in local projects such as he organized and were therefore prepared to support Plot's perambulations and to send specimens to his Museum.

Plot at the Ashmolean created a true centre of empirical research and also a tradition of study. From his example during the next fifty years flowed a series of studies in local or delimited natural history. Plot's work supplied a model, and remained a point of reference throughout the eighteenth century for antiquaries and naturalists alike. More important, as the several copies of his works that survive with annotations show, his works were read by the men at whom they were directed - the county gentry of England.

Anthony Turner

Further reading: the best modern account of Plot is M. W. Greenslade, The Staffordshire Historians, (Collections for a History of Staffordshire: Staffordshire Record Society, 4th series, vol. 11, 1982), ch. v. A valuable collection of source materials relating to him is in R. T. Gunther, Dr Plot and the Correspondence of the Philosophical Society of Oxford (Oxford, 1939).