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| 1657 |
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| The foundation of the Accademia del Cimento of Florence, the first organized scientific academy and a center for the new experimental science that stemmed from the work of Galileo. | 1 |
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| 1659 |
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| Christiaan Huygens (1629–95) revealed, in Systema Saturnium, that Saturn is surrounded by a thin, flat ring. | 2 |
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| 1660–74 |
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| ROBERT BOYLE (1627–91) described his first pneumatic pump, an improvement on that invented by Otto von Guericke (1602–86), in New Experiments Physicomechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air. In the second edition (1662) Boyle noted the relation between pressure and volume now called Boyle's law. With this pump Boyle showed that animals die from a lack of air, not from the accumulation of noxious vapors. So began an era in respiration studies that included the elucidation of lung structure (1661) by Marcello Malpighi (1628–94), the proof that fresh air is necessary for respiration (1667) by Robert Hooke (1635–1703), the observation that blood changes color when in contact with air (1667–69) by Richard Lower (1631–91), and the demonstration that the volume of air is reduced in respiration (1674) by John Mayow (1640–79). | 3 |
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| 1661 |
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| Boyle published his Sceptical Chymist, which contained a vigorous criticism of the Aristotelian theory of elements and the Paracelsian theory of principles. | 4 |
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| 1662 |
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| Charles II of England chartered the Royal Society of London, an independent organization that became the major center of English scientific activity during the 17th and 18th centuries. | 5 |
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| 1662 |
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| Jeremiah Horrocks (1619–41) predicted and was the first man to observe (1639) a transit of Venus across the disk of the sun. His work was posthumously published in Venus in sole visa (1662). | 6 |
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| 1664 |
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| Publication of Descartes's posthumous work L'homme, expounding a mechanistic interpretation of the animal body. Giovanni Borelli (1608–79), in De motu animalium (1680), linked Galilean mechanics to Cartesian mechanistic biology. | 7 |
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| 1664–68 |
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| Isaac Barrow (1630–77), the teacher of Isaac Newton, showed, in his mathematical lectures at Cambridge University, that the method of finding tangents and the method of finding areas were inverse processes. | 8 |
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| 1665 |
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| The Royal Society of London published the first issue of its Philosophical Transactions (March 1665), the first scientific journal in the English-speaking world. | 9 |
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| 1665 |
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| Robert Hooke published Micrographia, containing descriptions of his microscopic observations. He first used the word cells to describe the lacework of rigid walls seen in cork. The observations of Hooke and other classical microscopists—Marcello Malpighi, Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), Jan Swammerdam (1637–80), Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723)—revealed the complex minute structure of living matter and the existence of microorganisms. | 10 |
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| 1666 |
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| Louis XIV of France founded the Académie Royale des Sciences, a government-controlled and -financed organization dedicated to experimental science. The activity of the Académie was regularly recorded in the Journal des Savants, one of the earliest scientific periodicals. Women were not allowed to be members of the Académie Royale, nor of the English Royal Society. | 11 |
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| 1669 |
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| Erasmus Bartholin (1625–98) published his observations on double refraction in crystals of Iceland spar. | 12 |
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