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The Accademia dei Lincei ("Academy of the Lynxes", also known as The Lincean Academy), founded in Rome 1603, is the world's oldest scientific society. As the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, it has been the official scientific academy of Italy since 1871.

The Academy was founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi (1586-1630), an aristocrat from Umbria who was passionately interested in natural history, above all in botany, and three of his friends, the Dutch Johannes Van Heeck (italianized to Giovanni Ecchio), and two fellow Umbrians, Francesco Stelluti and Anastasio de Filiis. Cesi and his friends took on the goal of understanding all of the natural sciences, an emphasis that set the Lincei apart from the host of 16th and 17th century Italian Academies, most of which were literary anf antiquarian. They chose the name lynx because of the traditional belief that those cats have unusually sharp vision.

Free experiment was Cesi's plan, respectful of tradition, but untrammeled by blind obedience to authority, even that of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which the new science was calling into question.

Galileo was admitted to the group on December 25 1611, and became its intellectual center. The academy published his works and supported him through his disputes with the Catholic Church. Among the academy's early publications in the fields of astronomy, physics and botany were the study of sunspots and the famous Saggiatore of Galileo, and the Tesoro Messicano (Mexican Treasury) describing the flora, fauna, and drugs of the New World, which took decades of labor, down to 1651. With this publication, the first, most famous phase of the Lincei was concluded. Cesi's own intense activity was cut short by his sudden death in 1630, scarcely 45 years of age.

The Linceans produced an important collection of micrographs, or drawings made with the help of the newly invented microscope. After Cesi's death, the academy closed and the drawings were collected by Cassiano dal Pozzo, a Roman antiquarian, who sold them in 1763 to George III of the United Kingdom. The drawings were discovered in Windsor Castle in 1986 by art historian David Freedberg.

After the unification of Italy, the Piedmontese Quintino Sella infused new life into the Nuovo Lincei, reaffirming its ideals of secular science, but broadening its scope to include humanistic studies: history, philology, archeology, philosophy, economics and law, in two classes of Soci (Fellows). The modern Lincei have constituted a pantheon of European intellectuals: from Righi and Pacinotti to Fermi, from Pasteur to Roentgen and Einstein, from Mommsen to Wilamowitz, Comparetti, Croce, and Gentile.

External links

• Official website, with brief history (in Italian). (http://www.lincei.it/)

es:Accademia dei Lincei it:Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei