Minutes before the journal of 17th-century British physicist and astronomer Robert Hooke was to go on auction yesterday, the Royal Society, of which Hooke was a founding fellow, reached an agreement to buy it for about $1.75 million.

The society said it had raised the sum – the value the auction house Bonhams had assigned it – through private and institutional donations from around the world, which it declined to identify.

The announcement that the lot had been withdrawn was met with a round of applause in the auction room and was seen as a victory for the heritage of Britain.

“This is great news for science and great news for Britain. Robert Hooke was a colossal figure in the founding of modern science, and these documents represent an irreplaceable record of his contribution,” the president of the society, Lord Rees of Ludlow, said.

The Royal Society, whose fellows include the president of Rockefeller University and Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, plans to digitize the journal and display it at its annual exhibition in July. The journal contains draft minutes of Royal Society meetings.

The chairman of the Art Loss Register, Julian Radcliffe, who represented the society in its negotiations, argued that the society was the rightful owner of the work under British law. He described the money exchanged as compensation to the seller for looking after the work.

“It’s in some ways not a sale, but a return of the documents with payment,” Mr. Radcliffe, who spoke to The New York Sun as he was boarding a plane to Boston from London to consult on antiquities of disputed provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, said. “It happens quite often. We’re negotiating about 150 of these at any one time.”

The parties to the agreement were Bonhams, the seller, who chooses to remain anonymous, and the society.