not the dissolute, prevaricating, pleasure-loving monarch, whose reign reduced England to the lowest political level she has touched in modern times, but rather the eager student who vied in making experiments with the other members of the Society, and who directed the influence of his great position toward the promotion of knowledge and research with a vigorous enthusiasm such as the world had never seen before, and very seldom since, in the occupant of a throne.

Meanwhile, events happened which, although disastrous to the community in general, tended to advance the new Society and create for it augmented popular interest. The frightful epidemic of plague of 1665, in London, followed by the great fire of 1666, caused all classes to turn to the Royal Society for advice looking to the prevention of such scourges and the rebuilding of the devastated town: this time seriously and earnestly, and not à la mode. And the Society rose to the occasion, and investigated building materials and new modes of construction, roadmaking and the laying out of streets, together with ways and means of destroying infection, and specifics against the dread disease.

Its enthusiasm matched that of its royal patron. "The Fellows set to work to prove all things that they might hold fast that which was good," remarks Professor De Morgan, satirically, forgetting that this was the first institution in which the idea of progress was distinctly embodied. True, they considered whether sprats were young herrings; whether a spider would stay within a circle of powdered unicorn's horn (which it would not); whether barnacles turned into geese; whether diamonds grew in their beds like oysters; and if one should choose to select further absurdities, it would not be difficult to make their proceedings appear grotesque. But this is not only de

1De Morgan: A Budget of Paradoxes. London, 1872.

2 Buckle: Hist. of Civilization. N. Y., 1877, i. 269.

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liberately to disregard a long list of experiments which are useful and valuable, but to ignore the famous announcement made by Robert Hooke, which is at once a declaration of independence of the old philosophy, and a tolling of its knell.1

Although Sir Kenelm Digby was of the council (and then in high favor at court, being named in the king's charter as "chancellor to his dearest mother Queen Mary") the Society, even before its regular organization, demolished his magnetic nostrum and apparently did not even think it worth while to consider the report of the "curators of the proposal of tormenting a man with the sympathetic powder"—a committee which it appointed in June, 1661.

Among the members was Dr. (afterwards Sir) Christopher Wren, who appears on a different eminence from that which he occupies as the great architect of St. Paul's cathedral in London, and of the graceful spire which throws its shadow across the busiest part of Broadway. He invented the first registering and recording apparatus —a weather-gage and clock combined, actuating a pencil over a record surface so that "the observer by the traces of the pencil on the paper might certainly conclude, what winds had blown in his absence over twelve hours space;" the registering thermometer, the pluviometer, balances for determining weight of air, besides many improvements in astronomical instruments; but more interesting to us is his arrangement of a huge terrella in an opening in a flat

"This Society will not own any hypothesis, system or doctrine of the principles of natural philosophy, proposed or mentioned by any philosopher, ancient or modern, nor the explication of any phenomena, where recourse must be had to original causes (as not being explicable by heat, cold, weight, figure and the like, as effects produced thereby), nor dogmatically define nor fix axioms of scientifical things, but will question and canvass all opinions, adopting nor adhering to none, till by mature debate and clear arguments, chiefly such as are deduced from legitimate experiments, the truth of such experiment be demonstrated invincibly.” Weld: Hist. R. S., i. 146.

board "till it be like a globe with the poles in the horiThis board he dusted over with steel filings "equally from a sieve" and then studied the curves of the filings as they delineated the magnetic spectrum. Sprat tells us that he found that "the lines of the directive virtue of the lodestone" are "oval" and that appears to have been another recognition of "lines" of directive virtue-a conception curiously similar to Faraday's lines of magnetic force.

Among the other experiments which Sprat records, made prior to 1665, when the Society began the publication of its transactions, are essays "to manifest those lines of direction by the help of needles; to discover those lines of direction when the influence of many lodestones is compounded; to find what those lines are in compassing a spherical lodestone, what about a square, and what about a regular figure; to bore through the axis of a lodestone and fill it up with a cylindrical steel." Experiments also were made on lodestones "having many poles and yet the stones seeming uniform;" " on the directive virtue of the lodestone under water," and "to examine the force of the attractive power through several mediums."

No reform sought by the Society proved of higher moment to the progress of science than that which put an end to the De Natura Rerum treatise. If any one had anything to communicate, it compelled him to do so relevantly and briefly. It ruthlessly rejected dissertations starting from the time of Adam, introductory to a physical fact observed yesterday. It "exacted from all its members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen and merchants before that of wits or scholars." Thence sprang that requirement which enters into all highly-developed modern systems of Patent Law, that a specification shall not be addressed to the erudite and learned, but shall be written

THE ROYAL SOCIETY.

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in such full, clear and exact terms that any person skilled in the art to which it nearest relates shall be able to understand it and put it in practice. In a word, the Royal Society completely revolutionized didactic and technical writing and the mode of expressing scientific thought, and thereby did enough, had it immediately afterwards gone out of existence, to earn for itself the perpetual gratitude of mankind.

Yet the glowing language of the ode which Cowley addresses to the young Society, in which he compares it to Gideon's band picked out by divine design to do “noble wonders," and predicts its discovery of "New Scenes of Heaven" and "Crowds of Golden Worlds on High," not to mention numerous new countries on earth, by no means commanded universal assent. In fact, the poet especially desires that

"Mischief and tru Dishonour fall on those
Who would to laughter or to scorn expose
So Virtuous and So Noble a Design "-

which referred, with direct indirection, to Butler, who lampooned, and to Hobbes who both sneered and thundered at the new repository of all wisdom, and to the many others who detested the Baconian method as subversive of religion, civil law, reason and true learning. Stubbe, writing to Robert Boyle, beseeches him to consider "the mischief it hath occasioned in this once flourishing kingdom," and warns him, that unless he seasonably relinquishes "these impertinents" "all the inconveniences that have befallen the land, all the debauchery of the gentry . . . will be charged on your account."' Imagine the most pious and amiable of English philosophers held to responsibility for the eccentricities of Lady Castlemaine and Mistress Eleanor Gwynne!

There was a deal of appropriateness in Mr. Stubbe's solicitude that Boyle should abandon the Society. He

'Thorpe: Essays on Hist. Chemistry, cit. sup.

was by all odds the most able man in it-its leading spirit; and, at the time of its establishment, easily the most eminent experimental philosopher in the land-for Bacon was dead and Newton yet a "sober, silent thinking lad."

In the year 1658, Gaspar Schott,' a German Jesuit and a pupil of Kircher, published a voluminous treatise on Universal Magic, in which he described, for the first time, von Guericke's air-pump and discovery of the weight of the air-facts which he had learned from von Guericke himself. Schott's work came into Boyle's hands, and he at once saw something which von Guericke apparently had overlooked-namely, that important results should follow the study of rarefied air. Thereupon, with the assistance of Robert Hooke, he devised a new and more effective form of air-pump and demonstrated the elasticity or spring of the air, and the law of the relation between gas volume and pressure, which has ever since borne his name. He was the first scientific chemist'-the first to teach that chemistry was independent of other arts and not a mere adjunct; and the publication of his Skeptical Chemist, in 1661, marked the overthrow of both the Aristotelian and the Paracelsan doctrines of the elements. With him began the new era in scientific research, when its highest aim became the simple advancement of natural knowledge.3

In Boyle's treatise* touching the spring of the air (1659), we find him experimenting upon the lodestone and observing that a vacuum does not prevent the passage of its

1 Schott: Magia Universalis, Naturæ et Artis, Pars III. et IV. Her bipolis. 1658.

2And the object of Sir Boyle Roche's famous Hibernicism "The father of modern chemistry and cousin to the Earl of Cork!"

3 Roscoe & Schorlemmer: Treatise on Chemistry. New York, 1883, i., 10.

See The Works of the Honourab'e Robert Boyle, London, 1744. Edited by Thomas Birch.