The number of male and female slaves imported to the North American British colonies balances out for the first time.

Otto Müller is among the first to see bacteria since Leeuwenhoek and the first to classify them into types.

First American tobacco companies open their doors in Virginia.

The Spanish reverse a 1730 decision and declare that slaves fleeing to Florida from Carolina will not be sold or returned.

Jethro Tull's Horse-hoeing husbandry advocates the use of manure, pulverization of the soil, growing crops in rows, and hoeing to remove weeds.

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer publishes Sacred Physics, a pictorial account of Earth's history based on the Old Testament. Included is a description of what he believes is a fossilized victim of the biblical flood.

The Reverend George Berkeley establishes the Berkeley Scholarships for graduate study at Yale, the first such scholarships in America.

Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" first issued.

Slaves aboard the ship of New Hampshire Captain John Major kill both captain and crew, seizing the vessel and its cargo.

Nöel-Antoine Pluche publishes the first of eight volumes of Le spectacle de la nature (Spectacle of nature), popularizing "natural theology" in France.

Quaker Elihu Coleman's A Testimony against That Anti-Christian Practice of Maling Slaves of Men is published.

Stephen Hales' Statical essays, containing haemastatics, etc., two volumes, reports his investigations on blood flow and pressure in animals and the hydrostatics of sap in plants.

The Swedish scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg proposes a hierarchical universe, still generally based on a Newtonian static universe, but with matter clustered on ever larger scales of hierarchy, endlessly being recycled. This idea of a hierarchical universe and the nebular hypothesis were developed further (independently) by Thomas Wright (1750) and Immanuel Kant (1775).

René de Réamure's Mémaoires pour servir à l'histoire des insects (History of insects) is one of the foundation works in entomology.

Georgia petitions Britain for the legalization of slavery.

Louis XV, King of France, declares that when an enslaved woman gives birth to the child of a free man, neither mother nor child can be sold. Further, after a certain time, mother and child will be freed.

Under an English law Georgia prohibits the importation and use of black slaves.

Systema Naturae (System of Nature) by Carolus Linnaeus introduces the system of classification for organisms that is still in use today.

(no entry for this year)

An indentured black servant petitions a Massachusetts court and wins his freedom after the death of his master.

Hermann Boerhaave prints Jan Swammerdam's Biblia naturae (Bible of nature), which was originally published to little notice in 1658. It contains his reports on the dissection of insects under a microscope.

Linnaeus's Genera Plantorum (Genera of Plants) explains his method of systematic botany and classifies 18,000 species of plants.

Georgia's trustees permit the importation of black slaves.

Spanish Florida promises freedom and land to runaway slaves.

Slaves in Stono, South Carolina rebel, sacking and burning an armory and killing whites. Some 75 slaves in South Carolina steal weapons and flee toward freedom in Florida (then under Spanish rule). Crushed by the South Carolina militia, the revolt results in the deaths of 40 blacks and 20 whiteThe colonial militia puts an end to the rebellion before slaves are able to reach freedom in Florida.

Native Americans traveling with French soldiers find mastodon fossils along the Ohio River. The bones will be shipped back to France and become the first American fossils studied by scientists.

David Hume publishes A Treatise of Human Nature.