Early in my graduate school years, when I was reading indiscriminately in Princeton University's great Firestone Library, I came upon a passage in John Evelyn's History of Religion that set me wondering: "The soul, as seated more conspicuously in the brain, does, by the originated neurology, give intercourse to the animal spirits."¹ The complex parts of this seemingly inconspicuous sentence were remarkable and required unpacking. Besides, at that time in the 1960s Evelyn's profile was hugely different from what it has become today. Although he was one of the founders of the Royal Society and an engineer of the Restoration of Charles II, he was then conceived as a purely antiquarian mentality; looking backward and curiously eclectic in his choice of recondite subjects (genealogy, forestry, gardens, numismatics, religion, town planning); a figure in the main-stream of neither the humanities nor the sciences but stranded on an isthmus somewhere in between.² His histories, personal life and didactic literature had not yet become intriguing in the way we construe them now, and his biography — even his recently discovered amorous life — was virtually non-existent.³