Rediscovered discoveries

Flower with a summer sun.
Photograph: Fred Hunt/AP
"Among the many useful discoveries which this age hath made, there are very few which, better deserve the attention of the public than what I am going to lay before your lordship."

This is the less than modest introduction to Edmund Stone's account in 1763 of the medicinal properties of willow bark, writes James Randerson. "There is a bark of an English tree," he wrote, "which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish (sic) and intermitting disorders."

The pain-relieving properties he hit upon are due to salicylic acid - the forerunner to aspirin.

Stone's paper is part of a huge online database of every paper held in the dusty libraries of the Royal Society - Britains premier scientific academy, which was founded in 1660. And the academy has now given free access to these papers via the internet.