SEEING FURTHER ed. Bill Bryson (Harper Press, £25) The photo on the back flap of the dust jacket – Bill Bryson photographed with Isaac Newton’s death mask in the Reading Room of the Royal Society — is eminently suitable. For the book is subtitled The Story of Science & the Royal Society, the contributors are all Fellows of the Royal Society or distinguished science writers. and the book has been published to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the birth of the Royal Society.

It was founded one damp night in late November 1660, by a dozen men who had gathered to hear in some college rooms in London to hear the young Christopher Wren (who was not yet famous) give a lecture on astronomy. It seemed a good idea to form a society; two years later, granted a charter by Charles II, it became the Royal Society.

Bill Bryson’s excellent introduction celebrates the society’s breadth of interest, as well as the accomplishments of its members. The society invented scientific thinking and peer review; it made English the primary language of scientific writing instead of Latin. Its early members were interested in microscopy, woodland management, architectural load-bearing, the thermal expansion of glass, the development of the pocket watch. Over the 350 years of its existence, the roll call includes such names as Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Alexander Fleming and Dorothy Hodgkin – besides Newton and Wren.

The roll call of contributors is also rightly impressive. Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, writing (needless to say) about Darwin and the path to natural selection; Richard Fortey, of the London Natural History Museum, stressing the crucial importance of observation; biographer Richard Holmes writing about Joseph Banks (President of the Royal Society in 1783) and the advent of manned balloon flights.

Georgina Ferry’s chapter on ‘X-ray visions’ celebrates the achievement of crystallographers — among them Oxford’s Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin — and their painstaking, tenacious work that at the time seemed hopeless: using physical techniques to reveal the structure of life.

Paul Davies writes on ‘our changing place in the universe’. The Royal Society was founded shortly after Copernicus’ discovery that the Earth was not the centre of the universe; this new century may provide answers to questions in cosmology and astrobiology that may challenge the ‘Copernican principle’ that we are typical’ rather than special.

Sir Martin Rees, current president of the Royal Society, wraps up this birthday offering, looking to the future. The past 350 years have seen unimaginable strides in our understanding of the universe; but scientists can never reach finality, he says. Scientists have a special responsibility to the fruits of their ideas, and this is perhaps more so now than ever before.

This is not a book to be undertaken lightly. Its physical weight reflects the heavyweights writing inside, and the intellectual weight of their subject matter. Nevertheless, it appeals to the senses as well as to the intellect: lavishly illustrated in colour, its chapters easily identified.

How to commemorate the achievements of Royal Society members in a single book? Impossible. But, given that impossibility, this is a lively, learned celebration, and a fitting tribute to the achievements of an institution whose members have given us gravity, evolution, the electron, the double helix, the internet and a large part of the modern world.

* Richard Dawkins, Georgina Ferry and Steve Jones will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 20.