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The year 1682 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Astronomy

  • A comet is observed, which later becomes known as Comet Halley, after Edmund Halley successfully predicts its return in 1758.

Discoveries

  • Antony Van Leeuwenhoek discovers the banded pattern of muscle fibers.

Botany

  • John Ray publishes his Methodus plantarum nova, which sets out his system to divide flowering plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons.

Exploration

  • René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle canoes down the Mississippi River, naming the Mississippi basin Louisiana in honour of Louis XIV.

Medicine

  • English naval surgeon James Yonge (1646–1721) publishes Wounds of the Brain Proved Curable, probably the first monograph in English on surgery of the head.

Births

  • February 4 – Johann Friedrich Böttger, German alchemist and developer of porcelain manufacture (died 1719)
  • February 25 – Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist (died 1771)
  • March 24 – Mark Catesby, English naturalist (died 1749)
  • April 16 – John Hadley, English mathematician (died 1744)
  • July 10 – Roger Cotes, English mathematician (died 1716)

Deaths

  • July 12 – Jean Picard, French astronomer (born 1620)
  • October – J. J. Becher, German physician and chemist (born 1635)