Years before the advent of virtual Zoom meetings, in June 2013 MHSNJ revived an earlier practice of holding occasional informal meetings at ailing members’ homes. To be sure, the format differed, designed as a recruitment tool to expand and revitalize membership, and when the first program was held at the Belskie Museum in Closter, the series was called “The Lunar Society of MHSNJ.” That was in deference to England’s august ““Lunar Society of Birmingham” which met monthly between 1765 and 1812 by the light of the full moon which made returning home through unlit streets easier and safer. Members referred to themselves as “Lunartics” and included such luminaries as William Withering, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley — occasionally even Benjamin Franklin. MHSNJ’s new venture couldn’t pretend to approach the sheer brilliance of the British society, but at least could aspire to recreate the congenial yet serious spirit of the original group. Regrettably, the idea didn’t catch on and after a few meetings was discontinued, later to be replaced by virtual meetings. What follows next provides some more information about the original Lunar Society.

Meetings often were held in members’ homes, usually only a dozen or so attended, sometimes dinner was served and everything was kept informal; no bylaws, minutes, declarations or publications — just friends discussing common interests. As the chemist Priestley recalled, “We had nothing to do with the religious or political principles of each other. We were united by a common love of science, which we thought sufficient to bring together people of all distinctions, Christians, Jews, Mohammedans and Heathens, Monarchists and Republicans.” Once when the physician, botanist, polymath Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of both Charles Darwin and Frances Galton, was unable to attend because of pressing medical affairs, he lamented: “Lord! What inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, mechanical and pyrotechnical will be on the wing, bandy’d like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! While poor I, I by myself, imprizon’d in a poor chaise, am joggled and jostled, and bump’d and bruised along King’s high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever.”