Can one species be transmuted into another just by swapping their blood? What are those funny little things swimming in my water? Did this Einstein guy get his math right?

Those are a few of the questions addressed in a trove of history-making papers published by the United Kingdom's Royal Society and released in their entirety to celebrate the 350th birthday of the world's oldest scientific body.

The 60 papers are a testament to human curiosity, and the power of ingenuity and rigorous observation to overcome ignorance. Here's a few of Wired Science's favorites:

__1666: "__Tryals Proposed by Mr. Boyle to Dr. Lower, to be Made by Him, for the Improvement of Transfusing Blood out of One Live Animal into Another"

In this grisly opener to the inaugural issue of Philosophical Transactions, doctor Richard Lower suggested that the nature of organismal character might be revealed by swapping blood between dogs. He wondered if "a fierce Dog, by being often quite new stocked with the blood of a cowardly Dog, may not become more tame," and whether "a Dog, replenisht with adventitious blood, he will know and fawn upon his Master; and do like customary things as before?" The answer, unsurprisingly, was no.

1671: "A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors"

In one of the most famous experiments ever, Newton used a glass prism to spread a beam of light into a rainbow spectrum, demonstrating that colors were a property of light's refraction. Not mentioned, however, is Newton's earlier studies of light, in which he stuck a needle into his eye and recorded how colors changed as he pressed his retina into different shapes.

__1677: "Observations, Communicated to the Publisher by Mr. Antony van Leewenhoeck, in a Dutch Letter of the 9th of Octob. 1676. Here English'd: concerning Little Animals by Him, Observed in Rain-Well-Sea. and Snow Water; as also in Water Wherein Pepper Had Lain Infused" __

With new instruments of observation come discoveries; Leeuwenhoek, the father of microscopy, was the first person to see bacteria and protozoa (again and again and again, as the paper describes in painstaking detail.) To help his audience appreciate their size, he likened "the propotion of one of these small Water-creatures to a Cheese-mite, to be like that of a Bee to a Horse."

1752: "A Letter of Benjamin Franklin, Esq; to Mr. Peter Collinson, F.R.S. concerning an Electrical Kite"

Franklin was already famed for showing how an iron rod atop a tall building would attract lightning, thus demonstrating that thunderbolts were electrical rather than supernatural in nature. Here Franklin describes a methodological trick that allowed the experiment to be "made in a different in more easy manner, which any one may try."

__1822: "Account of an Assemblage of Fossil Teeth and Bones of Elephant, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Bear, Tiger, and Hyaena, and Sixteen Other Animals; Discovered in a Cave at Kirkdate, Yorkshire, in the Year 1821: With a Comparative View of Five Similar Caverns in Various Parts of England, and Others on the Continent" __

Reverend William Buckland believed in the Bible and Noah's tale. But he was also a geologist, and knew that layers of fossils contained in varying sedimentary layers couldn't have been deposited by a single deluge. Moreover, bones found in Yorkshire caves couldn't have been carried by floodwaters, but must have come from animals who lived in a time undescribed by literal readings of scripture. Buckland went on to describe the first dinosaur.

1920: "A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun's Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919"*

*Before Einstein was a frizzy-haired icon of physics, he was an unknown amateur with a wild but intriguing theory about gravity, space and time. If it was true, then light should bend as it passed through the sun's gravitational field — and that's exactly what researchers watching a total solar eclipse found, thus propelling Einstein and his theory into the limelight.

__1965: "The Fit of the Continents Around the Atlantic" __

Even though man was about to walk on the moon, the idea that continents drifted across Earth's surface was still controversial. In this paper, Edward Bullard showed how neatly the continents fit together, from their shape to common properties of rocks and fossils.Plate tectonics is now widely accepted, and an instructive reminder of how human knowledge is continually under construction.

Images: The Royal Society. 1) The design of Newton's prism experiment. 2) Ben Franklin flying his kite in a thunderstorm. 3) Bullard's drawings of the fit between South America and Africa."

See Also:

Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.