the Low Countries and for a canal to unite the Rhine and Danube. In 1678, he crossed to England. He travelled to Scotland where he visited the mines at the request of Prince Rupert. He afterwards travelled for the same purpose to Cornwall, and spent a year there. At the beginning of 1680, he presented a paper to the Royal Society in which he attempted to deprive Christiaan Huygens of the honour of applying the pendulum to the measurement of time. In 1682, he returned to London, where he wrote Närrische Weisheit und weise Narrheit (in which, according to Otto Mayr he made extensive references to temperature regulated furnaces), a book the Chymischer Glücks-Hafen, Oder Grosse Chymische Concordantz Und Collection, Von funffzehen hundert Chymischen Processen and died in October of the same year. Legacy Austrian Cameralist Becher was the most original and influential theorist of Austrian cameralism. He sought to balance between the need to reinstate postwar levels of population and production both in the countryside and the towns. By leaning more seriously on trade and commerce, Austrian cameralism helped to transfer attention to the troubles of the monarchy's urban economies. Ferdinand II had already taken some corrective steps before he died by attempting to ease the debts of the Bohemian towns and to put limits on some of the land-holding nobility's commercial rights. Even though preceding Habsburgs had held the guilds responsible for their restrictiveness, wastefulness, and the poor value of the merchandise they created, Ferdinand II ramped up the pressure by extending rights to private artisans who usually then earned the fortification of powerful local leaders such as seigneurs, military commanders, churches, and universities. An edict by Leopold I in 1689 had granted the government the right to monitor and control the number of masters and cut down on the monopoly effect of guild operations. Even previous to this, Becher, who was against all forms of monopoly, surmised that a third of the Austrian lands’ 150,000 artisans were "Schwarzarbeiter" who were not in a guild. Immediately after the Thirty Years’ War the Bohemian towns had petitioned Ferdinand to refine its own raw materials into more finished goods for export. Becher became the leading force in attempting this conversion. By 1666 he had inspired the creation of a Commerce Commission (Kommerzkollegium) in Vienna, as well as the reestablishment of the first postwar silk plantation on the Lower Austrian estates