From the British Quarterly Review. ROBERT BOYLE. A History of the Royal Society, with Memoirs of the Presidents. By CHARLES RICHARD WELD, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, Assistant-Secretary and Librarian to the Royal Society. In 2 vols. London: John W. Parker, West Strand, 1848. Occasional Reflections. By the Hon. ROBERT BOYLE. J. H. Parker, Oxford and London, 1848. Boyle Lectures for 1846. By FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, M.A., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, and Professor of Divinity in King's College, London. London: John W. Parker, West Strand. Second edition, 1848. Ir is reported of Thomas Carlyle that he | once half-jestingly declared his intention of writing a life of Charles II., as one who was no sham or half man, but the perfect specimen of a bad king. Charles, however, if he did no other good thing, founded the Royal Society, and by so doing saved his portrait from being cut out in untinted black, by the stern humorist's scissors. The thoughtless monarch, no doubt, did as little for science as he well could. The only incident in his life which can be referred to as indicating a personal interest in it, is his sending the Society a recipe for the cure of hydrophobia; but the act was probably prompted as much by his love of dogs as his love of science. Sheer carelessness on his part appears to have been the cause of the Society's not obtaining confiscated lands in Ireland, which he was willing it should possess, and which would have ultimately yielded an ample revenue. The members besought him for apartments where they might meet and keep their library, curiosities, and apparatus. Charles at last gave them a dilapidated college and grounds at Chelsea; but characteristically enough, it turned out that the property was only in part his to give; and the Society finding it had inherited little else than a multitude of lawsuits, was glad to restore the college to Government, and accept a small sum in exchange. Yet Charles did more for science, at a time, too, when royal patronage was a precious thing, than many wiser and better monarchs have done, and it would be difficult to discover any sinister or interested motive which the King had in assisting the philosophers. He probably did not pretend (except in the Society's charters, which in all likelihood he never read) to revere science as truth, or covet it as power, but he could wonder at it as marvellous. It dealt in novelties, and he was too intelligent and inquisitive not to be struck by them. It helped him through a morning, to attend on occasion, "an anatomical administration," at Gresham College, and see an executed criminal dissected. From time to time, also, the members of the Royal Society showed him their more curious experiments, and Charles first smiled approbation, and then generally found something to laugh at, either in the experiment or the experimenter. It occasioned him no little diversion, as we learn from Pepys, to witness the philosophers "weighing of ayre." He had too strong and practised a sense of the ludicrous not to be keenly alive to the little pedantries and formalities of some of the fellows; and too little reverence in his nature to deny himself a laugh at their weaknesses and follies. He was sometimes, no doubt, entitled to his smile at the experimenter; and always, if he saw fit, at the experiment. For everything on this earth has its ludicrous, as well as its serious aspect, and the grave man need not grudge the merry man his smile at what he thinks strange. An experiment, too, was a thing on the result of which a bet could be laid, as well as on the issue of a game at cards or a cockfight. The Royal Society was, on one occasion, instructed that " his Majesty had wagered £50 to £5 for the compression of air by water." (Weld, vol. i, p. 231.) A trial, accordingly, was made by one of its most distinguished members, and the King, as may be surmised, won his wager. (p. 232.) It is impossible to read the histories and eulogies of the Royal Society, without detecting in them, in spite of all their laudations of its kingly founder, a subdued, but irrepressible conviction, that by no address of the annalist can Charles II. be made to figure as an august patron and promoter of science. It is not that he will not brook comparison with such princes as Leo X., or the Florentine dukes. Charles could not be expected to equal them, but he took such pains to show that he had the progress of science as little at heart as the maintenance of personal virtue, or public morality, that he has baffled the most adroit royalist to say much in his praise. He was often expected at the public meetings of the Society, but he never accomplished an official visit. He dreaded, no doubt, the formality and tediousness of the séance, and his presence might have recalled the caustic proverb, "Is Saul, too, among the prophets?" Nevertheless, it might have fallen to the Royal Society's lot to have had a worse founder. Its seeds were sown and even germinated in the days of James I., but the philosophers were fortunate in escaping the patronage of the most learned of the Stuarts. James would have plagued them as much as Frederick the Great did the savans he favored. His sacred Majesty would have dictated to the wisest of them what they should discover, and how they should discover it. A wayward genius like Hooke would have paid many a visit to the Tower, or one to Tower Hill; and any refractory philosopher who persisted in interpreting a phenomenon otherwise than the royal pedant thought he should interpret it, would have been summarily reminded of the "King's divine right to rule," and treated as a disloyal subject. Charles I., we can well believe, looked on with unassumed interest at Harvey's dissection of the deer's heart, and demonstration of his great discovery of the circulation of the blood. Whatever that monarch's faults may have been, he had too religious a spirit not to have honored science, and too kingly a manner to have insulted its students. But his patronage would have compromised the liberties and lives of the philosophers during the civil war, and we should grudge now if the perversest cavalier among them had paid with his life for his scientific royalism. 66 The uncrowned king that followed the first Charles, had his hands too full of work, and his head and heart too much occupied with very different things, to have much patience with weighers of air, or makers of solid glass bubbles." (Rupert's drops, Weld, i. 103, 113.) But a hint that they could have · helped him to a recipe for "keeping his powder dry," or improved the build of his ships, or the practice of navigation, would at once have secured the favor of the sagacious Protector. When the restoration came, however, such services to Cromwell would have procured for the philosophers a swift and bloody reward. Things fell out, as it was, for the best. The infant society escaped the dangerous favors of King and Protector, till the notice of royalty could only serve it; and then it received just as much of courtly favor as preserved it from becoming the prey of knavish hatchers of sham plots, and other disturbers of its peace; and so little of substantial assistance that its self-reliance and independence were not forfeited in the smallest. Charles the Second did the Royal Society the immense service of leaving it to itself, and an institution numbering among its members such men as Newton, Boyle, and Hooke, (to mention no others,) needed only security from interruption, and could dispense with other favors. And it had to dispense with them. The title of the Society is apt to convey the impression that it had the government to lean upon, and was dowered from its treasury. But this was not the case. The Society was not fondled into greatness by royal nursing. Charles' only bona fide gift to it, was what Bishop Horsley, in an angry mood, denounced as 'that toy," the famous bauble mace, (Weld, ii. 168,) which the original warrant for its making, calls one guilt mace of one hundred and fifty OZ. (Weld, i. 163.) 66 In return for this benefaction the Society presented their patron with a succession of remarkable discoveries and inventions, which told directly on the commercial prosperity of his kingdom. The art, above all others the most important to this country, navigation, owes its present perfection in great part to the experiments on the weight of the air, and on the rise and fall of the barometer, to the improvements in time-keepers, and the astronomical discoveries and observations which Boyle, Hooke, Newton, and other members of the Royal Society, made during Charles the Second's reign. The one hundred and fifty ounces of silver gilt were returned to the treasury in his lifetime. In exchange for the regal title which they received, the Society made the monarch's reign memorable by the great discoveries which signalized that era, and under his nominal leadership won for him the only honorable conquests which can be connected with his name. Estimated in coin, or in honor, given and received, the king stands more indebted to the Society than the Society to him. We will not, however, strive to lessen Charles's merit. The gift of the mace, “bauble" though it was, may be accounted a sincere expression of good will. It probably appeared to the donor an act of selfdenial to let so much bullion of the realm go past the profligates of both sexes, who emptied his pockets so much faster than he could fill them; and the deed may pass for a liberal one. We willingly make the most of it. Charles the Second's reign is, from first to last, such a soiled and blotted page, that we are thankful for one small spot, which, like the happy ancients, we can mark with white. CAROLUS SECUNDUS REX, we think of with contempt, and loathing or indignation; but Charles Stuart, F.R.S., meant on the whole well, and did some little good in his day. It seems a vain thing, accordingly, to insist on singling out individuals, however gifted, as the founders of learned "bodies." The very title we apply to them might show us the folly of it. The body is not one member, but many." It was not the brain that produced it, nor the heart, although it may be true that these were first and fullest developed, and were essential to the knitting together of the weaker and less vital members. The association of gifted men, which after-wards became the Royal Society, rose into being simultaneously with many similar institutions in other parts of Europe. These were not copies of each other, but originated in the kindred sympathies of their several founders. Why such societies should have sprung up in the seventeenth century, and not earlier, or later, is a question not to be answered by reference to any single cause. It will not solve the problem, to say that Bacon was born at a certain epoch, or Galileo, or Newton. The birth of those and other great men, is as much part of the phenomenon to be explained, as the explanation of it. Neither will the invention of printing, nor the outburst of the Reformation, supply more than a part of the rationale. What we have to account for is this: kind stood for ages, with closed eyelids, before the magnificence of un-ideal Nature, or opened them only to gaze at her with the eyes of poets, painters, and mystics. They saw wondrous visions, and clothed Nature with splendid vestments, which they wove for her. All at once they bethought themselves, that the robes which God had flung over the nakedness of the material world might be worth looking at, and might prove a more glorious apparel than the ideal garments which man's imagination had fashioned for the universe. Man Charles's connection with the Royal Society, however, is a small matter in its history. He was its latest name-giver, not its founder. If any single person can claim that honor, it is Lord Bacon, who, by the specific suggestions in his "New Atlantis," but also, and we believe still more, by the whole tenor of his "Novum Organum," and other works on science, showed his countrymen how much can be done for its furtherance, by the cooperation of many laborers. But even Bacon must share the honor with others; learned societies are not kingdoms which the monarchs of intellect found; but republics, which The sleep of centuries was broken in a grow out of the common sympathies of many day. The first glances at the outer world minds. Fraternity is the rule, though not were so delightful, that the eye was not satequality, and there is no prating about lib-isfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. erty, for it is enjoyed by all. A Bacon or a Descartes does not act on his fellows like a great magnet, attracting to itself all the congenial metal within its range. A brotherhood grows as a crystal does. Particle seeks out like particle, and the atoms aggregate into a symmetrical whole. The crystal, when completed, has not the same properties in every part, but it is not Men longed to extend their grasp beyond the reach of the unassisted senses. Within a few years of each other, the telescope, the microscope, the thermometer, the barometer, the air-pump, the diving-bell, and other instruments of research, were invented and brought to no inconsiderable perfection. The air, the earth, the sea, the sky, were gauged and measured, weighed, tested, and The searching out of the willingly divulged secrets of Nature, was not delayed till the seventeenth century, because none but Bacons, Newtons, Galileos, Descartes, and Pascals were competent to the task. We need not ask whether men of as ample, or exactly the same gifts, had preceded those great ones. It is certain that men with endowments liberal enough to have discovered much, if not all, that has been left for us and our immediate forefathers to find out, adorned even the darkest epoch of the earlier ages. Among the astrologers and alchemists, were men of such rare genius, that, if by some choice anæsthetic they could have been flung into a trance, and kept pleasantly dreaming of "the joy of Jupiter," and the elixir of life, till the present time, they would awake to dispute the palm with our Herschels and Faradays. We will attempt no other explanation of the sudden, universal, and catholic recognition of the interest and importance of physical science, which characterized the seventeenth century, than thisthat mankind, as a whole, is possessed of a progressive intellectual life, which, like organic life, is marked at intervals by sudden crises of permanent expansion. The seed shoots forth the germ. The petals blow into the flower; the chrysalis bursts into the butterfly. The boy starts into the youth; his thoughts are elevated, his desires changed; and so the whole race, in a brief interval of time, is lifted to a higher intellectual level, and its speculations directed into new channels. The aloe buds, thorns, and leaves only for ninety-nine years, and we have to wait till the hundredth comes, before the flower blooms. The flower is not an accident of the hundredth year, but its complement and crown. Had the thorns not protected the leaves, and the leaves elaborated the juices during the ninety-nine barren years, the century would not have been crowned by the flower. Yet why the aloe blooms in its hundredth, rather than in its fiftieth or its tenth year, is not explained by this acknowledgment. The contest between Charles the First and the English people was contemporaneous with an aloe flowering of the genius of the nations of Europe. It was no accident, or mere result of a certain century having ar rived. The printing-press, and the Reformation, the births of great men, and much else, were its thorns and leaves, and wide-spread supporting roots; but we cannot say, therefore, the revolution in men's scientific tastes occurred after 1600, rather than after 1500 or 1700, any more than we can demonstrate that 1848 was the necessary and infallible year for the overturning of the thrones of Europe. The Royal Society was one of the choicest buds of this blossoming of the European intellect. Its beginnings were some two hundred years ago, about 1645, when “divers ingenious persons" met weekly in London, to make experiments and discuss the truths they taught. "We barred," says Dr. Wallis, one of their members, "all discourses of divinity, of state affairs, and of news, other than what concerned our business of philosophy." About the year 1648-9, some of their company removed to Oxford, upon which, the society, like a polypus, divided itself into two. The one half, provided with a new tail, remained in London; the other, furnished with a new head, throve at Oxford. It was afterwards matter of dispute which was the better half, but we need not discuss the question. The halves came together in London, and after Charles the Second's return, "were about the beginning of the year 1662, by his majesty's grace and favor, incorporated by the name of the Royal Society." It had no fixed title before its incorporation. Boyle spoke of it as the "Invisible College.' Evelyn wrote of it as a "Philosophic Mathematic College." Cowley called it the "Philosophical Colledge." Only sickly infants are christened in haste. It was an earnest of the Royal Society's longevity that it had long been weaned, and was out of leading-strings, before it was named. The "History of the Royal Society" is a part of the history of the Empire. For nearly two hundred years it has gathered together one great division of the highest intellects of the nation, and given unity and a practical aim to their labors. All its doings have not been wise, or its works fruitful. But its errors have been singularly few, and its most abstract, and apparently visionary occupations have, in the great majority of cases, been found, in the end, ministering to the welfare of all men. It has expanded the intellect of the whole people; been the true, though sometimes unconscious and generally distrusted ally of religion; and the faithful, though too often unthanked servant of government, which it has aided and guided in increasing | oquent recognition of the debt of gratitude the commercial and political greatness of the country. The Society will never be thanked as it deserves for its direct services to the empire, much less for its indirect ones. It is not that men are unthankful, but that they are slow to perceive that there is occasion for thanks, and they are blind to their true benefactors. Rarely does a scientific inquiry like "Davy's Researches on Flame," bud, blossom, and bear fruit, like Aaron's rod, in a single night, and show forth, on the morrow, a safetylamp, the value of which men hasten to acknowledge by cheques on their bankers, and a service of plate to Sir Humphry. In general, one man sows and another reaps; the acorn is planted in this age, and the oak felled in the next. The seed-time is forgotten before the harvest comes. Too often, also, while the sower was a very wise man, the reaper is only a very needy or greedy one. He puts a money value on the grain, which the public pays, and cries quits. It would be difficult to extort from many a London or Liverpool ship-owner an acknowledgment that the Royal Society did him a service by persuading Government to spend a round sum of money in sending out vessels to observe the transit of Venus over the sun's disc. It would be still more difficult to persuade him that he owed thanks to the astronomers of Charles the Second's reign, for watching, night after night, the immersions and emersions of Jupiter's moons; that Dr. Robert Hooke was his benefactor, by experimenting upon the properties of spiral springs, and Dr. Gowan Knight by making artificial magnets. The ship-owner furnishes his captains with nautical almanacs, chronometers, and compasses, and thanks no one. The bookseller and instrument-maker have got their own price for their goods. Businessmen do not thank one another when value is given for value. All London has been out gaping at the new electric light. It has gone home with dazzled eyes, not to meditate statues to Volta, or Davy, or Faraday, but to reflect that the light is patent and must be paid for, and to consider the propriety of disposing of its shares in the gas companies, and retiring from the oil and tallow trade. which the nation owes the Royal Society has appeared, to wipe away its reproach among the ignorant. He must be an exacting man of science who is not satisfied with the graceful tribute to the worth of his labors which a great literary man has so willingly paid. We have spoken of the past glories of the Royal Society, but though its history has been four, we may say, five times written, it has not become a historical thing. It never ranked a greater number of men of genius among its fellows than it does at present, and we trust that the time is far distant when the Society shall end with the name with which it began, and become, in sad earnest, the Invisible College. Three of the earliest members of the Royal Society distinguished themselves from the other fellows by the innumerable additions which they made to natural knowledge, or, as we should now call it, physical science. These were Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle. The last is to be the special object of our further remarks. In genius he was the least of the three, but to be least in that triad was to be great among ordinary men. He comes before his greater brethren in point of time. He was older than Newton by fifteen years, and older than Hooke by nine. Newton wrote to Boyle as to a grave and reverend senior, and Hooke, who in early life was his experimental assistant, displayed to his old master a love and esteem such as he exhibted to no other philosopher. It was long ago observed that Boyle was born in the year in which Bacon died, and it soon appeared that a corner, at least, of the deceased prophet's mantle had fallen upon him. He was the earliest pupil who applied, in practice, the lessons of the Novum Organum; the oldest, though not the greatest of the Marshals, who won for himself a kingdom, by following the rules of conquest laid down by the Imperial Verulam. As the patriarch, therefore, of English experimental science, he takes precedence even of Newton. It is in this capacity that we propose chiefly to treat of Boyle. He was too memorable a man, however, in other respects, not to require his whole character to be sketched, though it can be only in outline. Many excellent biographies of him have appeared, but no recent English writer has given an analysis of his scientific researches, so that a good purpose may be served by giving an abstract of certain of the more imWhilst we are writing, Mr. Macaulay's el-portant of them, with an estimate of their We do not make these remarks complainingly. Scientific men have, at present, a fair share of the sympathy and gratitude of their unscientific brethren, and are every day receiving fuller and more kindly acknowledgment of the value of their services. |