Cromwell, who seems to have had a great
respect for his powers, appointed him Savilian professor of geometry
at Oxford in 1649.
respect for his powers, appointed him Savilian professor of geometry
at Oxford in 1649.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
The barometer, the
thermometer and the air pump, and, later, the compound micro-
scope, all came into being at the earlier part of our period, and by
the middle of the century were in the hands of whoever cared
to use them. Pepys, in 1664, acquired
a microscope and a scotoscope. For the first I did give him £5. 10. 0, a
great price, but a most curious bauble it is, and he says, as good, nay, the
best he knows in England. The other he gives me, and is of value; and a
curious curiosity it is to discover objects in a dark room with.
6
>
Two years later, on 19 August 1666 'comes by agreement Mr
Reeves, bringing me a lantern'-it must have been a magic
lantern—'with pictures in glass, to make strange things appear on
a wall, very pretty. '
As we pass from Elizabethan to Stewart times, we pass, in
most branches of literature, from men of genius to men of talent,
clever men, but not, to use a Germanism, epoch-making men. In
science, however, where England led the world, the descent became
an ascent. We leave Dr Dee and Edward Kelly, and we arrive at
Harvey and Newton.
The gap between the medieval science which still obtained in
## p. 351 (#373) ############################################
The Heritage of Bacon 351
queen Elizabeth's time and the science of the Stewarts was bridged
by Francis Bacon, in a way, but only in a way. He was a reformer
of the scientific methodl. He was no innovator in the inductive
method; others had preceded him, but he, from his great position,
clearly pointed out that the writers and leaders of his time observed
and recorded facts in favour of ideas other than those hitherto
sanctioned by authority.
Bacon left a heritage to English science. His writings and his
thoughts are not always clear, but he firmly held, and, with the
authority which his personal eminence gave him, firmly proclaimed,
that the careful and systematic investigation of natural phenomena
and their accurate record would give to man a power in this world
which, in his time, was hardly to be conceived. What he believed,
what he preached, he did not practise. “I only sound the clarion,
but I enter not into the battle’; and yet this is not wholly true,
for, on a wintry March day, 1626, in the neighbourhood of Barnet,
he caught the chill which ended his life while stuffing a fowl with
snow, to see if cold would delay putrefaction. Harvey, who was
working whilst Bacon was writing, said of him: 'He writes
philosophy like a Lord Chancellor. ' This, perhaps, is true, but
his writings show him a man, weak and pitiful in some respects,
yet with an abiding hope, a sustained object in life, one who
sought through evil days and in adverse conditions 'for the glory
of God and the relief of man's estate. '
Though Bacon did not make any one single advance in natural
knowledge—though his precepts, as Whewell reminds us, are now
practically useless '-yet he used his great talents, his high position,
to enforce upon the world a new method of wrenching from nature
her secrets and, with tireless patience and untiring passion,
impressed upon his contemporaries the conviction that there was
'a new unexplored Kingdom of Knowledge within the reach and
grasp of man, if he will be humble enough, and patient enough, and
truthful enough to occupy it. '
The most sublime of English poets survived into our period by
a few years. A comparison between Dante's and Milton's great
epics affords some indication of the advance in knowledge of this
world and in the outlook on a future state which measures the
progress made between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth
century. As a poet (and, indeed, often in other activities of his life)
Milton stood above, or at least, outside, the stream of tendency of
the times through which he lived. Yet, in his poems (not in his
1 Cf. as to Bacon and the new method,' ante, vol. iv, pp. 278 ff.
6
## p. 352 (#374) ############################################
352
The Progress of Science
political tractates—the most ephemeral of all literature) we see
effects of the rising tide of science on literature.
Milton, one must never forget-and indeed, it is not easy to do
80-was, for some years, a schoolmaster. He took a view of his
profession which even now would be thought liberal; he advocated
the teaching of medicine, agriculture and fortification, and, when
studying the last of these, remarked that it would be seasonable
to learn the use of the Globes and all the maps. Like lord
Herbert of Cherbury, he held that the student should acquire some
knowledge of medicine, he should know the tempers, the humours,
the seasons and how to manage a crudity. Himself, a sufferer
from gout, he learnt, at any rate, the lesson of moderation.
Mathematics, in his curriculum, led to the 'instrumental science of
Trigonometry and from thence to Fortification, Architecture,
Enginry or Navigation. '
At the time of the writing of Paradise Lost, the learned had
accepted the theory of Copernicus, although the mathematical
proof afforded a few years later by Newton was still lacking. But
the world at large still accepted the Ptolemaic system, a system
which, as a schoolmaster, Milton taught. Mark Pattison has
pointed out that these two
systems confront each other in the poem, in much the same relative position
which they occupied in the mind of the public. The ordinary, habitual mode
of speaking of celestial phenomena is Ptolemaiol; the conscious or doctrinal
exposition of the same phenomena is Copernican 2.
But the incongruity between these two statements is no greater
than will be found today in authors writing of subjects still sub
judice. Further, we must not forget that Milton never saw either
of his great epics in writing or in print. His power of impressing
his visions on the world was, however, such that Huxley held that
it was not the cosmogony of Genesis but the cosmogony of Milton
which had enthralled and misled the world.
More distinctly than in his epics, Milton, in his history, showed
a leaning to the scientific method. Firth has lately told us that 'bis
conclusions are roughly those of modern scholars, and his reasoning
practically that of a scientific historian. ' In one respect, however,
he was less than lukewarm. He had no sympathy with antiquarian
researches and sneered at those who take pleasure to be all their
lifetime raking the foundations of old abbeys and cathedrals. '
1 Mark Pattison cites Paradise Lost, vii, 339—-356; III, 420, 481. And yet, in 1639,
Milton had visited Galileo.
? See ibid. vin, 77, 122-140.
## p. 353 (#375) ############################################
Lord Herbert of Cherbury
353
a
To turn to other evidence, the better diaries of any age afford
us, when faithfully written, as fair a clue as do the dramatists of
the average intelligent man's attitude towards the general outlook
of humanity on the problems of his age, as they presented them-
selves to society at large. The seventeenth century was unusually
rich in volumes of autobiography and in diaries which the reading
world will not readily let die. Some account has been already
given of the autobiography of the complaisant lord Herbert of
Cherbury; it is again noticed here as giving an interesting account
of the education of a highly-born youth at the end of the sixteenth
and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Lord Herbert seems
to have had a fair knowledge of Latin and Greek and of logic
when, in his thirteenth year, he went up to University college,
Oxford. Later, he did attain the knowledge of the French,
Italian and Spanish languages,' and, also, learnt to sing his part at
first sight in music and to play on the lute. He approved of 'so
much logic as to enable men to distinguish between truth and
falsehood and help them to discover fallacies, sophisms and that
which the schoolmen call vicious arguments'; and this, he con-
sidered, should be followed by some good sum of philosophy. ' He
held it also requisite to study geography, and this in no narrow
sense, laying stress upon the methods of government, religions and
manners of the several states as well as on their relationships
inter se and their policies. Though he advocated an acquaintance
with the use of the celestial globes,' he did not conceive yet the
knowledge of judicial astronomy so necessary, but only for general
predictions ; particular events being neither intended by nor
collected out of the stars. Arithmetic and geometry he thought
fit to learn, as being most useful for keeping accounts and en-
abling a gentleman to understand fortifications.
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of lord Herbert's
acquirements was his knowledge of medicine and subjects allied
thereto. He conceived it a 'fine study, and worthy a gentleman to
be a good botanic, that so he may know the nature of all herbs and
plants. Further, it will become a gentleman to have some know-
. '
ledge in medecine, especially the diagnostic part'; and he urged
that a gentleman should know how to make medicines himself.
He gives us a list of the 'pharmacopaeias and anechodalies' which
he has in his own library and certainly he had a knowledge of
anatomy and of the healing art-he refers to a wound which
penetrated to his father's 'pia mater,' a membrane for a mention
· See ante, vol. VII, pp. 204–5.
23
E. L. VIII.
CH. XV.
## p. 354 (#376) ############################################
354
The Progress of Science
of which we should look in vain among the records of modern
ambassadors and gentlemen of the court. His knowledge, however,
was entirely empirical and founded on the writings of Paracelsus and
his followers; nevertheless, he prides himself on the cures he effected,
and, if one can trust the veracity of so self-satisfied an amateur
physician, they certainly fall but little short of the miraculous.
John Evelyn, another example of a well-to-do and widely
cultivated man of the world', was acquainted with several foreign
languages, including Spanish and German, and took interest in hiero-
glyphics. He studied medicine in 1645 at Padua, and there acquired
those 'rare tables of veins and nerves' which he afterwards gave
to the Royal Society; attended Le Felure's course of chemistry at
Paris in 1647, was skilled in more than one musical instrument,
learned dancing and, above all, devoted himself to horticulture.
When travelling abroad, he made a point of visiting the
cabinets' of collectors, for, at that time, public museums, which,
in fact, grew out of these cabinets, were non-existent. The follow-
ing quotation records the sort of curiosities at which men marvelled
in the year 1645 :
Feb. 4th. We were invited to the collection of exotic rarities in the
museum of Ferdinando Imperati, a Neapolitan nobleman, and one of the
most observable palaces in the citty, the repository of incomparable rarities,
Amongst the naturall herbals most remarkable was the Byssus marina and
Pinna marina; the male and female cameleon; an Onacratulus; an extra-
ordinary greate crocodile; some of the Orcades Anates, held here for a great
rarity; likewise a salamander; the male and female Manucodiata, the male
having an hollow in the back, in wch 'tis reported the female both layes and
batches her egg; the mandragoras of both sexes; Papyrus made of severall
reedes, and some of silke; tables of the rinds of trees written wth Japonią
characters; another of the branches of palme; many Indian fruites; a
chrystal that had a quantity of uncongealed water within its cavity; a petri.
fied fisher's net; divers sorts of tarantulas, being a monstrous spider with
lark-like clawes, and somewhat bigger.
But Evelyn's chief contribution to science, as already indicated,
was horticultural. He was devoted to his garden, and, both at his
native Wotton, and, later, at Sayes court, Deptford, spent much time
in planting and planning landscape gardens, then much the fashion.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the fact that 'nitre'
promoted the growth of plants was beginning to be recognised.
Sir Kenelm Digby and the young Oxonian John Mayow, experi-
mented de Sal-Nitro; and, in 1675, Evelyn writes: 'I firmly
believe that where saltpetre can be obtained in plenty we should
not need to find other composts to ameliorate our ground. ' His
1 See ante, chap. x.
## p. 355 (#377) ############################################
Evelyn and Pepys
355
well known Sylva, published in 1664, had an immediate and a
widespread effect, and was, for many years, the standard book on
the subject of the culture of trees. It is held to be responsible for
a great outbreak of tree-planting. The introduction to Nisbet's
edition gives figures which demonstrate the shortage in the avail-
able supply of oak timber during the seventeenth century. The
charm of Evelyn's style and the practical nature of his book, which
ran into four editions before the author's death, arrested this
decline ('be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when
ye're sleeping' as the laird of Dumbiedykes counselled his son),
and to the Sylva of John Evelyn is largely due the fact that the
oaken timber used for the British ships which fought the French in
the eighteenth century sufficed, but barely sufficed, for the national
needs.
Pepys, whose naïve and frank self-revelations have made him the
most popular and the most frequently read of diarists, was not quite
of the same class of student to which lord Herbert of Cherbury or
John Evelyn belonged. But, gifted as he was with an undying and
insatiable curiosity, nothing was too trivial or too odd for his
notice and his record; and, being an exceptionally able and hard-
working government servant, he took great interest in anything
which was likely to affect the navy. He discoursed with the
ingenious Dr Kuffler "about his design to blow up ships' noticed
the strange nature of the sea-water in a dark night, that it seemed
like fire upon every stroke of the oar'-an effect due, of course, to
phosphorescent organisms floating near the surface—and interested
himself incessantly in marine matters. His troubled eyesight and
his love of music account for the attention he paid to optical
appliances, the structure of the eye, musical instruments of every
kind and musical notation; for this last, he seems to have invented
a system which is still preserved at Magdalene college, but which
no one now understands.
Physiology and mortuary objects had, for him, an interest which
was almost morbid. He is told that 'negroes drounded look white,
and lose their blackness, which I never heard before,' describes how
‘one of a great family was. . . hanged with a silken halter. . . of his
own preparing, not for the honour only' but because it strangles
more quickly. He attended regularly the early meetings of the
Royal Society at Gresham college, and showed the liveliest interest
in various investigations on the transfusion of blood, respiration
under reduced air pressure and many other ingenious experiments
1 See ante, chap. . .
a
23-2
## p. 356 (#378) ############################################
356
The Progress of Science
2
and observations by Sir George Ent and others. On 20 January
1665, he took home Micrographia, Hooke's book on microscopy-
'a most excellent piece, of which I am very proud. '
Although Pepys had no scientific training-he only began to
learn the multiplication table when he was in his thirtieth year,
but, later, took the keenest pleasure in teaching it to Mrs Pepys-
he, nevertheless, attained to the presidentship of the Royal Society.
He had always delighted in the company of the virtuosos' and, in
1662, three years after he began to study arithmetic, he was
admitted a fellow of their—the Royal Society. In 1681, he was
elected president. This post he owed, not to any genius for science,
or to any great invention or generalisation, but to his very ex-
ceptional powers as an organiser and as a man of business, to his
integrity and to the abiding interest he ever showed in the cause
of the advancement of knowledge.
If we pass from the interest taken in scientific progress by men
of superior intelligence to the obstacles opposed to it by popular
ignorance and superstition, we are brought face to face with the
long-lived crew of witches, wizards and alchemists. It is often
said that the more rationalistic outlook of the seventeenth century,
due to Hobbes and others, did much to discredit these practitioners.
But the observant dwellers in our cities or remote country villages,
pestered as they are with advertisements of those who practise
palmistry, and of those who predict the future by crystal-gazing
or by the fall of sand, of followers of the sporting prophet,
and of far more presumptuous and more dangerous impostors,
or confronted by the silent, indomitable belief of the rustic in
the witchery of his ancestors, may well hold the opinion that the
stock of superstition is a constant stock and permeates now, as it
did in Elizabeth's time, every class of society. What improvement
there was in the seventeenth century, and it is extremely doubtful
if there was much, was largely due to the advent of James I and
the later rise of puritanism, associated as they were with the most
cruel and most inhuman torture of sorcerers. When the alchemist
and the astrologer ran the risk of suffering as a sorcerer or a
warlock, he paused before publicly embarking on the trade.
Under the Tudors, the laws against witchcraft were milder than
those of other countries, but, under James I, these laws were
repealed and he himself took-as he had done before in Scotland -
an active part in this cruel and senseless persecution. During the
first eighty years of the seventeenth century, no less than 70,000
men and women are said to have been executed for alleged offences
## p. 357 (#379) ############################################
Witches, Astrologers and Alchemists 357
under the new act. The king even wrote a book on demonology,
attacking the more sensible and reasonable views of Scot and
Wier. It must be remembered, however, that, in these times, the
generality of learned and able men believed in the maleficent effects
of sorcery and the black art. The bench of bishops and the bench
of judges alike took part in what seems to us a hideous and wanton
brutality. Even so great a writer as Sir Thomas Browne, who tells
us, ‘for the sorrows of others he has quick sympathy,' gave evidence
against two unhappy women charged before Sir Matthew Hale at
Bury St Edmunds, and his evidence helped to secure their iniquitous
conviction.
Browne, like many of his day, was a firm believer in horoscopes—
'I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn and I think I have a
piece of that leaden planet in me. ' He was, however, perhaps
a little in advance of some of his contemporaries; at any rate, he
recognised that foretellings based on star-gazing do not always
'make good. We deny not the influence of the stars but often
suspect the due application thereof. During the civil war, both
sides used astrologers and acted on their prognostications ; but, on
the whole, the firm belief that future events could be foretold by a
study of the planetary system was waning. They' (i. e. the stars)
'incline but do not compel. . . and so gently incline that a wise man
may resist them; sapiens dominabitur astris : they rule but God
rules them? ' This was said by Robert Burton, and it probably
represents the average opinion of the more educated in our period.
The part played by alchemy in the life of the times can be
judged by Ben Jonson’s Alchemist, first acted in 1610%, which
affords a true insight into the fashionable craze of the time. The
play was constantly presented from that date until the closing of
the theatres and, on the restoration, was one of the first plays to
be revived. Jonson certainly had mastered the jargon of this form
of quackery, and showed a profound knowledge of the art of its
professors. In Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, he refers to the
love philtres of one Forman, a most flagrant rascal who was mixed
up with the Overbury trial.
It has been said that a competent man of science should be able
to put into language 'understanded of the people’ any problem, no
matter how complex, at which he is working. This seems hardly
possible in the twentieth century. To explain to a trained histologist
1 Anatomy of Melancholy, part 1, sec, 11, Mem. 1, seo. ,
2 Cf. ante, vol. vi, chap. I, pp. 22–23.
## p. 358 (#380) ############################################
358 The Progress of Science
double functions or to a skilled mathematician the intricacies of
karyokinesis would take a very long time. The introduction in all
the sciences of technical words is not due to any spirit of per-
verseness on the part of modern savants; these terms, long as they
usually are, serve as the shorthand of science. In the Stewart
times, however, an investigator could explain in simple language
to his friends what he was doing and the advance of natural science
was keenly followed by all sorts and conditions of men.
Whatever were the political and moral deficiencies of the
Stewart kings, no one of them lacked intelligence in things artistic
and scientific. The pictures at Windsor and at Buckingham palace
which the nation owes to Charles I and Charles II are only
approached by those it owes to the knowledge and taste of queen
Victoria's consort. At Whitehall, Charles II had his little elabo-
'
ratory, under bis closet, a pretty place',' and was working there but
a day or two before his death, his illness disinclining him for his
wonted exercise. The king took a curious interest in anatomy; on
11 May 1663, Pierce, the surgeon, tells Pepys that the other day
Dr Clerke and he did dissect two bodies, a man and a woman
before the King with which the King was highly pleased. ' Pepys
also records, 17 February 1662/3, on the authority of Edward
Pickering, another story of a dissection in the royal closet by the
king's own hands.
It has, I think, seldom been pointed out that Charles II's
ancestry accounts for many of his qualities and especially for his
interest in science. He was very unlike his father, but his mother
was the daughter of a Medici princess, and the characteristics of
that family are strongly marked in the 'merry monarch. ' His gaiety
and wit and his skill in money matters when he chose to apply
himself, all bring to mind the Italian family from which he sprang?
Another royal personage, prince Rupert, 'full of spirit and
action, full of observation and judgement,' about this time invented
his 'chemical glasses which break all to dust by breaking off a
little small end: which is a great mystery to me? ' He had,
6
1 Pepys, 15 Jan. 1669.
Even the swarthy complexion of Charles II was probably due to his Italian blood,
and his fondness for outdoor sports is another trait which is often observed in the
Medici themselves. There is an old engraving of a portrait of Lorenzo (d. 1648),
the brother of Cosimo II, which shows an astonishing resemblance to Charles II; and
it is interesting to remember that Cosimo II earned his chief claim to the gratitude
of posterity by his courageous encouragement, protection and support of Galileo, who
owed to him the opportunity and means of making his famous astronomical discoveries.
3 Pepys, 13 Jan. 1662.
## p. 359 (#381) ############################################
Worcester. Kenelm Digby.
Wallis 359
says Gramont, quelques talens for chemistry and invented a new
method for making gunpowder, for making 'hails hot' and for
boring cannon. His traditional invention of the almost lost art of
mezzotint is probably due to the fact that, at an early date, the real
inventor, Ludwig von Siegen, explained to him his process and that
prince Rupert demonstrated with his own hands this new method
of engraving to Evelyn.
Another aristocratic inventor, Edward Somerset, second marquis
of Worcester, has received more credit than he deserved. He was
interested in mechanics and employed a skilled mechanician, one
Kaltoff, in his laboratory, but his claims to have invented a steam-
engine do not bear critical investigation, and his well known Cen-
tury of Inventions does not rise to the level of The Boy's Own
Book of the last century. Many of his suggestions, though ingenious,
are based on fallacies, and comparatively few of them were practical.
A curiously versatile amateur in science was Sir Kenelm Digby,
of whom mention has already been made elsewhere? . Like most
prominent men of his time, he intervened in theological questions,
besides playing an active part in public affairs. He was an original
member of the Royal Society, but, although he is reported to have
been the first to record the importance of the 'vital air'—we now
call it oxygen—to plants, and although he had gifts of observation,
his work lay largely in the paths of alchemy and astrology, and he
seems to have had recourse to a lively imagination in estimating
the results of his experiments. He trafficked in the transmutation
of metals, and his name was long associated with a certain powder
of sympathy' which, like the 'absent treatment of the twentieth
century practitioners of Christian science, 'acted at a distance. '
Evelyn looked on him as a quack, 'a teller of strange things,' and
lady Fanshawe refers to his infirmity of lying; he was certainly a
great talker. Still, other men of his epoch spoke well of him and
his conversation was doubtless stimulating if profuse.
6
3
6
>
In mathematics, John Wallis was, to some extent, a forerunner
of Newton. At Felsted school and at Emmanuel college, he re-
ceived the curiously wide education of his age. He was a skilled
linguist; although he had taken holy orders, he was the first of
Francis Glisson's pupils to proclaim in public Harvey's discovery
of the circulation of the blood, but his bent was towards mathe-
matics, and he possessed an extraordinary memory for figures. His
Arithmetica Infinitorum is described as “the most stimulating
See ante, vol. VII, chap. IX, pp. 222—3.
6
## p. 360 (#382) ############################################
360 The Progress of Science
mathematical work so far published in England. ' It contained the
germs of the differential calculus, and it suggested to Newton, who
'read it with delight,' the binomial theorem. In it was evaluated,
and it must not be forgotten that to Wallis we owe the symbol for
infinity, co. Living in troublesome times, under many rulers, he con-
trived, not without some loss of popularity, to remain on good terms
with all. His services were, indeed, indispensable to a succession
of governments, for he had a power of deciphering which was
almost miraculous.
Cromwell, who seems to have had a great
respect for his powers, appointed him Savilian professor of geometry
at Oxford in 1649.
Another mathematical ecclesiastic was Seth Ward, bishop of
Exeter and afterwards of Salisbury. Ward was educated at
Sidney Sussex college and. in 1643, was chosen as mathematical
lecturer to the university at Cambridge. But, like Wallis, he
was appointed, and in the same year, to a Savilian professor-
ship, that of astronomy-another instance, not uncommon at
the time, of men educated at Cambridge but recognised and
promoted at Oxford. He took the place of the ejected John
Greaves, who magnanimously used his influence in his successor's
favour. Ward was renowned as a preacher; but his later fame
rested chiefly on his contributions to the science of astronomy, and
he is remembered in the world of science mainly for his theory of
planetary motion. Ward and Wallis—but the burden of the attack
was borne by the latter-laid bare Hobbes's attempted proof of the
squaring of the circle; there was also a little controversy 'on the
duplication of the cube,' and mixed up with these criticisms in the
realm of pure reason were political motives. Hobbes had not
begun to study Euclid until he was forty; and, after Sir Henry
Savile had founded his professorships at Oxford, Wood says that
not a few of the foolish gentry ‘kept back their sons' in order not
'to have them smutted by the black art'-80 great was the fear
and the ignorance of the powers of mathematics. Ward was a
pluralist, as was the manner of the times, and Burnet tells us 'he
was a profound statesman but a very indifferent clergyman. ' Yet,
what money he got he lavishly spent on ecclesiastical and other
purposes
1 As bishop of Exeter, he restored, at the cost of £25,000, the cathedral; repaired
the palace; considerably increased the value of the poorer benefices of his diocese and
of the prebends of his cathedral; and gave a considerable sum of money towards the
cost of making the river navigable from his cathedral city to the sea. He founded the
Seth Ward almshouses at Salisbury, and he gave certain farms and fee-farm rents for
scholarships at Christ's college, Cambridge.
a
## p. 361 (#383) ############################################
Newton and Harvey
361
Like the distinguished mathematicians just mentioned, Isaac
Newton took a keen interest in certain forms of theology current in
his day; but in his intellectual powers he surpassed not only them
but all living mathematicians and those who lived after him. His
supreme genius
has ensured him a place in the very small list of the
world's thinkers of the first order. He, too, exercised a certain
influence in affairs, and, during his later years, he took a keen interest
in theological speculations; but his activities in these fields are com-
pletely overshadowed by the far-reaching importance of his great
discoveries as a natural philosopher and a mathematician. As the
discoverer of the decomposition of white light in the spectrum, he
may be regarded as the founder of the modern science of optics.
His discovery of the law of gravitation, and his application of it to 2
the explanation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion and of the
principal inequalities in the orbital motion of the moon made him
the founder of the science of gravitational astronomy. His dis-
covery of the method of fluxions entitles him to rank with Leibniz
as one of the founders of mathematical analysis. All these great 3
discoveries gave rise to long and sometimes acrimonious con-
troversies among his contemporaries, relating both to the subjects
themselves and to priority of discovery. In a letter to Halley
referring to one of these disputes, Newton writes :
Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady, that a man has as
good be engaged in lawsuits, as have to do with her. I found it so formerly,
and now I am no sooner come near her again, but she gives me warning.
His chief work, Principia, has been described by dean Peacock as
'the greatest single triumph of the human mind. '
The second man of outstanding genius in British science in the
seventeenth century was Harvey, who, like Newton, worked in one
of the two sciences which, in Stewart times, were, to some extent,
ahead of all the others. Harvey, 'the little choleric man' as
Aubrey calls him, was educated at Cambridge and at Padua and
was in his thirty-eighth year when, in his lectures on anatomy, he
expounded his new doctrine of the circulation of the blood to the
college of Physicians, although his Exercitatio on this subject did
not appear till 1628. His notes for the lectures are now in the
British Museum. He was physician to Charles I; and it is on record
how, during the battle of Edgehill, he looked after the young
princes as he sat reading a book under a hedge a little removed
from the fight.
In the chain of evidence of his convincing demonstration of the
1 Newton held the office of president of the Royal Society for the last twenty-five
years of his life, a period exceeded only in the case of one president, Sir Joseph Banks.
9
## p. 362 (#384) ############################################
362 The Progress of Science
>
circulation of the blood, one link, only to be supplied by the
invention of the compound microscope, was missing. This, the
discovery of the capillaries, was due to Malpighi, who was amongst
the earliest anatomists to apply the compound microscope to
animal tissues. Still, as Dryden has it,
The circling streams once thought but pools of blood
(Whether life's fuel or the body's food),
From dark oblivion Harvey's name shall save 1.
Harvey was happy in two respects as regards his discovery,
It was, in the main and especially in England, recognised as proven
in his own lifetime, and, again, no one of credit claimed or asserted
the claim of others to priority. In research, all enquirers stand on
steps others have built up; but, in this, the most important of
single contributions to physiology, the credit is Harvey's and almost
Harvey's alone. His other great work, Exercitationes de Genera-
tione Animalium, is of secondary importance. It shows marvellous
powers of observation and very laborious research ; but, although,
to a great extent, it led the way in embryology, it was shortly
superseded by works of those who had the compound microscope at
their command. Cowley, a man of wide culture, wrote an Ode on
Harvey in which his achievement was contrasted with a failing
common to scientific men of his own time, and, so far as we can see,
of all time:
Harvey sought for Truth in Truth's own Book
The Creatures, which by God Himself was writ;
And wisely thought 'twas fit,
Not to read Comments only upon it,
But on th' original it self to look.
Methinks in Arts great Circle, others stand
Lock't up together, Hand in Hand,
Every one leads as he is led,
The same bare path they tread,
A Dance like Fairies a Fantastick round,
But neithor change their motion, nor their ground:
Had Harvey to this Road confin'd his wit,
His noble Circle of the Blood, had been untroden yet.
Harvey's death is recorded in a characteristic seventeenth
century sentence, taken from the unpublished pages of Baldwin
Harvey's Bustorum Aliquot Reliquiae :
Of William Harvey, the most fortunate anatomist, the blood ceased to
move on the third day of the Ides of June, in the year 1657, the continuous
movement of which in all men, moreover he had most truly asserted . . .
"Εν τι τροχώ πάντες και εν πάσι τροχοί.
1 Epistle to Dr Charleton.
? The writer is indebted for this quotation to Dr Norman Moore's History of the
Study of Medicine in the British Isles, Oxford, 1908.
## p. 363 (#385) ############################################
Mayerne. Mayow. Sydenham. Glisson 363
Among other great physiologists and physicians, Sir Theodore
Turquet de Mayerne (godson of Theodore Beza), who settled in
London in 1611, has left us Notes of the diseases of the great which,
to the medically minded, are of the greatest interest. He almost
diagnosed enteric, and his observations on the fatal illness of
Henry, prince of Wales, and the memoir he drew up in 1623 on
the health of James I, alike leave little to be desired in complete-
ness or in accuracy of detail.
Before bringing to a close these short notices of those who studied
and wrote on the human body, whole or diseased, a few lines must
be given to John Mayow of Oxford, who followed the law,'especially
in the summer time at Bath. Yet, from his contributions to
science, one might well suppose that he had devoted his whole
time to research in chemistry and physiology. He it was who
showed that, in respiration, not the whole air but a part only of the
air breathed in takes an active part in respiration, though he called
this part by a different name, he meant what we now call oxygen. '
Thomas Sydenham was one of the first physicians who was
convinced of the importance of constant and prolonged observation
at the bedside of the patient. He passed by all authority but
one-'the divine old man Hippocrates,' whose medicine rested also
on observation. He, first in England, 'attempted to arrive at
general laws about the prevalence and the course and the treat-
ment of disease from clinical observation. He was essentially
'
a physician occupied in diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. When
he was but 25 years old, he began to suffer from gout, and his
personal experience enabled him to write a classic on this disease,
which is even now unsurpassed.
Francis Glisson, like Sydenham, was essentially English in his
upbringing, and did not owe anything to foreign education. His
work on the liver has made 'Glisson's capsule' known to every
medical student, and he wrote an authoritative book on rickets.
He, like Harvey, was educated at Gonville and Caius college, and,
in 1636, became regius professor of physic at Cambridge, but the
greater part of his life he spent at Colchester. We must perforce
pass by the fashionable Thomas Willis and his more capable
assistant Richard Lower, with Sir George Ent, and others.
Great as were the seventeenth century philosophers in the
biological and medical sciences, they were paralleled if not
surpassed by workers on the physical and mathematical side.
Robert Boyle was, even as a boy of eighteen, one of the
· Foster, Sir Michael, The History of Physiology, Cambridge, 1901.
6
## p. 364 (#386) ############################################
364 The Progress of Science
leaders in the comparatively new pursuit of experimental science.
His first love was chemistry, 'Vulcan has so transported and
bewitched me as to make me fancy my laboratory a kind of
Elysium,' thus he wrote in 1649. A few years later (1652–3), in
Ireland, where he was called to look after the family estates, he
found it hard to have any Hermetic thoughts,' and occupied his
mind with anatomy and confirming Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of the blood. A year later, he settled at Oxford, where
he arranged a laboratory and had as assistant Robert Hooke.
Meetings were held alternately at Boyle's lodgings and at John
Wilkins's lodge at Wadham, and were frequented by Seth Ward
and Christopher Wren and by many others.
Stimulated by Otto von Guericke's contrivance for exhausting
air from a vessel, Boyle, aided by Hooke, invented what was called
the 'machina Boyliana,' which comprised the essentials of the air-
pump of today. At this time, Boyle busied himself with the
weight, with the pressure and with the elasticity of air—the part
it played in respiration and in acoustics. Like Newton, he took a
deep interest in theology, and not only spent considerable sums in
translating the Bible into foreign tongues, but learnt Greek, Hebrew,
Syriac and Chaldee so that he might read it at first hand. He
was, indeed, a very notable character. Suffering under continued
ill-health, with weak eyes, a slight stammer, and a memory
treacherous to the last degree, he was yet one of the most helpful
of friends and universally popular alike at the court of three
kings, and in the society of men of letters, men of business and
men of science. In spite of the fact that he was the first to
distinguish a mixture from a compound, to define an element, to
prepare hydrogen, though he did not recognise its nature, he had
in him the touch of an amateur, but an amateur of genius. His
style in writing was unusually prolix and he seldom followed out
his discoveries to their ultimate end.
It was men such as these that reestablished the Royal Society
in 1660. Exactly a century earlier, the first scientific society, the
Academia Secretorum Naturae of Naples had its origin. This
was followed by several others, most of them but shortlived, in
Italy and in France. Among English or Teutonic folk, the Royal
Society was the earliest to appear, and, even if we include the
scientific societies of the world, it has had the most continuous
existence. Indeed, before its birth, it underwent a long period of
incubation, and its inception was in reality in 1645. At that date,
a society known as the Philosophical, or, as Boyle called it, the
## p. 365 (#387) ############################################
Cowley and the Royal Society 365
>
'Invisible,' college came into being, which met from time to
time at Gresham college and elsewhere in London, During
the civil war, this society was split in two, some members
meeting in London, some at Oxford, but the meetings, wher-
ever held, were at irregular intervals. On the restoration, the
meetings were resumed in London and, in 1662, the society
received the royal charter.
Of all the poets of the time, Cowley took, perhaps, the greatest
interest in science. He had, indeed, like Evelyn and at about the
same date, developed a plan for the institution of a college of
science. Evelyn explains his scheme in a letter addressed to Robert
Boyle, dated 3 September 1659 from Sayes court, which contains
minute details as to the buildings, the maintenance, and the
government of his college, the inmates of which were to preserve
science and cultivate themselves. ' Cowley's scheme was also
elaborately thought out, and had the original and admirable
suggestion that, out of the twenty salaried professors, sixteen
should be always resident and four always travelling in the four
quarters of the world, in order that they might 'give a constant
account of all things that belong to the learning and especially
Natural Experimental Philosophy, of those parts. ' To his 'Philo-
sophical Colledge' was to be attached a school of two hundred
boys. Both these schemes, according to bishop Sprat, hastened
the foundation of the Royal Society, of which both projectors were
original members.
Cowley's poems were greatly admired during his lifetime, later
critics have considered him affected, perhaps because, like Donne,
he understood, and was not afraid to use the technical language of
the schools. We have quoted some of his lines on Harvey, and
may add a few from the ode with which he greeted the birth of
the Royal Society :
From . . all long Errors of the way,
In which our Praedecessors went,
And like th’ old Hebrews many years did stray
In Desarts but of small extent,
Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last
The barren Wilderness he past,
Did on the very Border stand
Of the blest promis'd Land,
And from the Mountains Top of his Exalted Wit,
Saw it himself, and shewed us it.
But Life did never to one Man allow
Time to Discover Worlds, and Conquer too;
Nor can so short a Line sufficient be
To fadome the vast depths of Natures Sea:
## p. 366 (#388) ############################################
366
The Progress of Science
The work he did we ought t'admire,
And were unjust if we should more require
From his few years, divided 'twixt th’ Excess
Of low Affliction, and high Happiness.
For who on things remote can fix his sight,
That's alwayes in a Triumph, or a Fight?
Donne, who, like Cowley, indulged in quaint poetical conceits
and who founded a new school of poetry, abjuring classical con-
ventions and classical characters, and treating of topics and objects
of everyday life, was not afraid of realism. 'Upon common objects,
Dr Johnson tells us, he was ‘unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle. '
Space limits us to one quotation:
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee.
Donne did not of course foresee the appalling part that these insects,
by the habits he mentions, play in the spread of such diseases
as bubonic plague and many epizootics in animals.
The dramatists of the Stewart period hardly afford us the help
we need in estimating the position occupied by science and by men
of science in the world of the seventeenth century. The astrologer
and the alchemist were then stock characters of the drama of
everyday life, just as the company promoter is now. "The Gentle-
“
men of Trinity Colledge' presented before the King's Majesty'a
comedy entitled Albumazar, which takes its name from the chief
character, an astrologer, a very arrant knave, and the type of the
false man of science. This play, originally printed in 1615, was soon
forgotten, but it was revived in 1668 and met with great success.
Samuel Butler, who was not a fellow of the Royal Society, for
some reason difficult to explain, spent much time in attacking it.
He wrote his entertaining satire on the virtuosi entitled The
Elephant in the Moon in short verse, and was so pleased with
it that he wrote it over again in long verse? Though this 'Satire
upon the Royal Society' remains a fragment, enough of it is extant
to show Butler did not appreciate what even in these days is not
always appreciated, that the minute investigation of subjects and
objects which to the ordinary man seem trivial and vain often lead
to discoveries of the profoundest import to mankind.
Ben Jonson, with his flair for presenting what zoologists
call 'type species,' showed, as has been seen, in his Alchemist
6
Cf. ante, chap. II.
## p. 367 (#389) ############################################
Political Economists
367
a
an unusual, but a thorough, mastery of the half scientific and
half quack jargon of the craft, so that this play is a quarry for
all interested in the history of chemical and physical studies.
To the play-writer of the time, the man of science or of pseudo-
science was a vague, peevish pedant, much occupied with physio-
gnomies, dreams and fantastic ideas as to the properties and powers
of various substances. But there seems to have been a clear
distinction drawn between a real and a false astrology, as is shown
in Dryden's An Evening's Love (1668)".
The political economists of the seventeenth century
were greatly influenced by the Baconian enthusiasm for empirical study;
they were eager to accumulate and interpret facts, and to apply inductive
methods to political phenomena. They therefore concerned themselves with
the anatomy of the body politic, and with numerical observations which
served as the best available substitute for experiment. They followed the
analogy of the biological rather than of the mathematical science of their
day; hence, their mode of thought has a close affinity with that which has
become current since the decline of the classical school of Political Economy.
Sir William Petty and the philosopher Locke are the best
known names in this group of political economists. Locke, in
particular, was interested in questions concerning the currency and
the rate of interest. Sir William Petty, who was among the first to
state clearly the nature of rent, wrote a celebrated Treatise of
Taxes and Contributions Captain John Graunt's Natural and
Political Observations marked the beginning of that interest in
statistical data concerning health and population which is a dis-
tinguishing feature of modern economic research. Another writer,
Samuel Fortrey, followed Petty in his endeavour to go behind the
mere art of taxation and analyse the ultimate sources of national
wealth in the land and labour of the country. In general, it may
be said that, in the seventeenth century, political economy was still
an art rather than a science. Between these writings and Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), there was a great gap; but the
practical observations of the seventeenth century were not without
use in supplying material for his scholarly and impartial analysis.
i Cf. ante, chap. I.
? Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. a1, p. 380.
? Cf. ante, chap. xiv.
## p. 368 (#390) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
THE ESSAY AND THE BEGINNING OF MODERN
ENGLISH PROSE
PERHAPS the most important literary achievement that falls
within the period covered by this volume is the creation of a prose
style, which, in structure if not in vocabulary, is essentially the
same as that of today. Caroline prose, the prose of Milton and
Taylor, of Browne and Clarendon, had produced, in the hands of
genius, some of the noblest passages in our literature. But, at the
restoration, men began to feel the need of an instrument upon
which the everyday performer might play-an instrument suited
to an age of reason, possessing, before all things, the homely virtues
of simplicity, correctness, lucidity and precision. These qualities,
indeed, were not unknown to English prose before the restoration.
They are to be found in private letters, not meant for the public
eye. Above all, they are to be found in the writings of the veteran
Hobbes, who, like Bacon and Ben Jonson, with both of whom he
had literary relations, disdained all superfluity of ornament, and
was content to make his prose a terse and pregnant expression of
a clear and vigorous intellect. But even Hobbes is by no means
free from the besetting sins of the older prose-careless construc-
tion and trailing relative clauses.
The new prose was the work of a multiplicity of causes, all
more or less reflecting the temper of the age. One of these was
the growing interest in science, and the insistence of the new
Royal Society on the need of a clear and plain style for scientific
exposition.
There is one thing more about which the Society has been most solicitous;
and that is the manner of their Discourse: which, unless they had been only
watchful to keep in due temper, the whole spirit and vigour of their Design
had been soon eaten out by the luxury and redundance of speech. . . . And, in
few words, I dare say that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner
obtain'd than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this
volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. . . . It will
suffice my present purpose to point out what has been done by the Royal
## p. 369 (#391) ############################################
Demand for Simplicity and Clearness 369
j
Society towards the correcting of excesses in Natural Philosophy, to which
it is of all others, a most profest enemy. They have therefore been most
vigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this
extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all ampli-
fication, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive
purity and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal
number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked,
natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native eas'ness,
bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and
preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before
that of Wits or Scholars.
So writes Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society. Almost
at the same time, in December 1664, his colleagues gave effect to
their views by appointing a committee for the improvement of the
English language, which included, besides himself, Waller, Dryden
and Evelyn'. Doubtless, it was out of this committee that the idea
arose of founding an English academy for the 'improvement of
speaking and writing' on the model of the French one. This idea
was discussed at three or four meetings held at Gray's inn, where,
in addition to the above, Cowley and the duke of Buckingham,
also members of the Royal Society, were present. But, in con-
sequence of the plague and 'other circumstances intervening,' the
plan came to nothing? '
The same need for greater plainness and simplicity of language
was felt in pulpit oratory so far back as 1646, when Wilkins, after-
wards bishop of Chester, one of the founders of the Royal Society,
and its first secretary, had recommended, in his popular Eccle-
siastes or the Gift of Preaching, that the style of preaching should
be plain and without rhetorical flourishes. After the restoration,
these views found an adequate exponent in his friend John
Tillotson, whose sermons at Lincoln's inn and St Lawrence Jewry
attracted large congregations. His St Paul's sermon, preached
before the lord mayor, in March 1664, and printed by request
under the title The Wisdom of being religious, is, in its perfect
plainness and absence of rhetoric, an instructive contrast to the
brilliantly imaginative discourse which Jeremy Taylor delivered,
only eight months earlier, at the funeral of archbishop Bramhall.
But the reformation of pulpit oratory was not the work of one
2
1 Evelyn embodied his views in a letter to the chairman, Sir Peter Wyche, which
is printed in J. E. Spingarn’s Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, vol. II,
pp. 310 ff.
Evelyn to Pepys (op. cit. vol. II, pp. 327 ff. ). As to the origin of the Royal Society
see, also, ante, chap. xv.
3 Cf. , as to the change in the style of pulpit oratory, ante, chap. XII.
* See ante, ib.
E. L. VIII. CH, XVI.
24
## p. 370 (#392) ############################################
370 The Essay and Modern English Prose
.
sermon or one man. Both Stillingfleet, reader at the Temple, who
was even more popular than Tillotson, and South, public orator at
Oxford, who was made a prebendary of Westminster in 1663,
belonged to the modern school. In a sermon preached on Ascen-
sion day 1667, the latter divine commended apostolic preaching for
its plainness and simplicity :
nothing here of the finger of the North-star . . . nothing of the door of angel's
wings or the beautiful locks of cherubims: no starched similitudes, intro-
duced with a 'thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion,' and
the like.
This ungenerous hit at Jeremy Taylor, who was lately dead, well
marks the antithesis between the new age and the old, between wit
and poetry, between reason and imagination.
Dryden's statement that‘if he had any talent for English prose
it was owing to his having often read the writings of the great
archbishop Tillotson' must be regarded as a piece of generous
exaggeration. At the most, he can only have learnt from him the
virtues of clear and logical statement, and of short, well coordi-
nated sentences. In the epistle dedicatory of The Rival-Ladies
(1664), and in the earlier part of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie
written in the summer of 1665, his management of the clause is
still somewhat uncertain. It is not till Neander, who represents
Dryden, joins in the discussion that we recognise our first master
of modern prose.
thermometer and the air pump, and, later, the compound micro-
scope, all came into being at the earlier part of our period, and by
the middle of the century were in the hands of whoever cared
to use them. Pepys, in 1664, acquired
a microscope and a scotoscope. For the first I did give him £5. 10. 0, a
great price, but a most curious bauble it is, and he says, as good, nay, the
best he knows in England. The other he gives me, and is of value; and a
curious curiosity it is to discover objects in a dark room with.
6
>
Two years later, on 19 August 1666 'comes by agreement Mr
Reeves, bringing me a lantern'-it must have been a magic
lantern—'with pictures in glass, to make strange things appear on
a wall, very pretty. '
As we pass from Elizabethan to Stewart times, we pass, in
most branches of literature, from men of genius to men of talent,
clever men, but not, to use a Germanism, epoch-making men. In
science, however, where England led the world, the descent became
an ascent. We leave Dr Dee and Edward Kelly, and we arrive at
Harvey and Newton.
The gap between the medieval science which still obtained in
## p. 351 (#373) ############################################
The Heritage of Bacon 351
queen Elizabeth's time and the science of the Stewarts was bridged
by Francis Bacon, in a way, but only in a way. He was a reformer
of the scientific methodl. He was no innovator in the inductive
method; others had preceded him, but he, from his great position,
clearly pointed out that the writers and leaders of his time observed
and recorded facts in favour of ideas other than those hitherto
sanctioned by authority.
Bacon left a heritage to English science. His writings and his
thoughts are not always clear, but he firmly held, and, with the
authority which his personal eminence gave him, firmly proclaimed,
that the careful and systematic investigation of natural phenomena
and their accurate record would give to man a power in this world
which, in his time, was hardly to be conceived. What he believed,
what he preached, he did not practise. “I only sound the clarion,
but I enter not into the battle’; and yet this is not wholly true,
for, on a wintry March day, 1626, in the neighbourhood of Barnet,
he caught the chill which ended his life while stuffing a fowl with
snow, to see if cold would delay putrefaction. Harvey, who was
working whilst Bacon was writing, said of him: 'He writes
philosophy like a Lord Chancellor. ' This, perhaps, is true, but
his writings show him a man, weak and pitiful in some respects,
yet with an abiding hope, a sustained object in life, one who
sought through evil days and in adverse conditions 'for the glory
of God and the relief of man's estate. '
Though Bacon did not make any one single advance in natural
knowledge—though his precepts, as Whewell reminds us, are now
practically useless '-yet he used his great talents, his high position,
to enforce upon the world a new method of wrenching from nature
her secrets and, with tireless patience and untiring passion,
impressed upon his contemporaries the conviction that there was
'a new unexplored Kingdom of Knowledge within the reach and
grasp of man, if he will be humble enough, and patient enough, and
truthful enough to occupy it. '
The most sublime of English poets survived into our period by
a few years. A comparison between Dante's and Milton's great
epics affords some indication of the advance in knowledge of this
world and in the outlook on a future state which measures the
progress made between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth
century. As a poet (and, indeed, often in other activities of his life)
Milton stood above, or at least, outside, the stream of tendency of
the times through which he lived. Yet, in his poems (not in his
1 Cf. as to Bacon and the new method,' ante, vol. iv, pp. 278 ff.
6
## p. 352 (#374) ############################################
352
The Progress of Science
political tractates—the most ephemeral of all literature) we see
effects of the rising tide of science on literature.
Milton, one must never forget-and indeed, it is not easy to do
80-was, for some years, a schoolmaster. He took a view of his
profession which even now would be thought liberal; he advocated
the teaching of medicine, agriculture and fortification, and, when
studying the last of these, remarked that it would be seasonable
to learn the use of the Globes and all the maps. Like lord
Herbert of Cherbury, he held that the student should acquire some
knowledge of medicine, he should know the tempers, the humours,
the seasons and how to manage a crudity. Himself, a sufferer
from gout, he learnt, at any rate, the lesson of moderation.
Mathematics, in his curriculum, led to the 'instrumental science of
Trigonometry and from thence to Fortification, Architecture,
Enginry or Navigation. '
At the time of the writing of Paradise Lost, the learned had
accepted the theory of Copernicus, although the mathematical
proof afforded a few years later by Newton was still lacking. But
the world at large still accepted the Ptolemaic system, a system
which, as a schoolmaster, Milton taught. Mark Pattison has
pointed out that these two
systems confront each other in the poem, in much the same relative position
which they occupied in the mind of the public. The ordinary, habitual mode
of speaking of celestial phenomena is Ptolemaiol; the conscious or doctrinal
exposition of the same phenomena is Copernican 2.
But the incongruity between these two statements is no greater
than will be found today in authors writing of subjects still sub
judice. Further, we must not forget that Milton never saw either
of his great epics in writing or in print. His power of impressing
his visions on the world was, however, such that Huxley held that
it was not the cosmogony of Genesis but the cosmogony of Milton
which had enthralled and misled the world.
More distinctly than in his epics, Milton, in his history, showed
a leaning to the scientific method. Firth has lately told us that 'bis
conclusions are roughly those of modern scholars, and his reasoning
practically that of a scientific historian. ' In one respect, however,
he was less than lukewarm. He had no sympathy with antiquarian
researches and sneered at those who take pleasure to be all their
lifetime raking the foundations of old abbeys and cathedrals. '
1 Mark Pattison cites Paradise Lost, vii, 339—-356; III, 420, 481. And yet, in 1639,
Milton had visited Galileo.
? See ibid. vin, 77, 122-140.
## p. 353 (#375) ############################################
Lord Herbert of Cherbury
353
a
To turn to other evidence, the better diaries of any age afford
us, when faithfully written, as fair a clue as do the dramatists of
the average intelligent man's attitude towards the general outlook
of humanity on the problems of his age, as they presented them-
selves to society at large. The seventeenth century was unusually
rich in volumes of autobiography and in diaries which the reading
world will not readily let die. Some account has been already
given of the autobiography of the complaisant lord Herbert of
Cherbury; it is again noticed here as giving an interesting account
of the education of a highly-born youth at the end of the sixteenth
and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Lord Herbert seems
to have had a fair knowledge of Latin and Greek and of logic
when, in his thirteenth year, he went up to University college,
Oxford. Later, he did attain the knowledge of the French,
Italian and Spanish languages,' and, also, learnt to sing his part at
first sight in music and to play on the lute. He approved of 'so
much logic as to enable men to distinguish between truth and
falsehood and help them to discover fallacies, sophisms and that
which the schoolmen call vicious arguments'; and this, he con-
sidered, should be followed by some good sum of philosophy. ' He
held it also requisite to study geography, and this in no narrow
sense, laying stress upon the methods of government, religions and
manners of the several states as well as on their relationships
inter se and their policies. Though he advocated an acquaintance
with the use of the celestial globes,' he did not conceive yet the
knowledge of judicial astronomy so necessary, but only for general
predictions ; particular events being neither intended by nor
collected out of the stars. Arithmetic and geometry he thought
fit to learn, as being most useful for keeping accounts and en-
abling a gentleman to understand fortifications.
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of lord Herbert's
acquirements was his knowledge of medicine and subjects allied
thereto. He conceived it a 'fine study, and worthy a gentleman to
be a good botanic, that so he may know the nature of all herbs and
plants. Further, it will become a gentleman to have some know-
. '
ledge in medecine, especially the diagnostic part'; and he urged
that a gentleman should know how to make medicines himself.
He gives us a list of the 'pharmacopaeias and anechodalies' which
he has in his own library and certainly he had a knowledge of
anatomy and of the healing art-he refers to a wound which
penetrated to his father's 'pia mater,' a membrane for a mention
· See ante, vol. VII, pp. 204–5.
23
E. L. VIII.
CH. XV.
## p. 354 (#376) ############################################
354
The Progress of Science
of which we should look in vain among the records of modern
ambassadors and gentlemen of the court. His knowledge, however,
was entirely empirical and founded on the writings of Paracelsus and
his followers; nevertheless, he prides himself on the cures he effected,
and, if one can trust the veracity of so self-satisfied an amateur
physician, they certainly fall but little short of the miraculous.
John Evelyn, another example of a well-to-do and widely
cultivated man of the world', was acquainted with several foreign
languages, including Spanish and German, and took interest in hiero-
glyphics. He studied medicine in 1645 at Padua, and there acquired
those 'rare tables of veins and nerves' which he afterwards gave
to the Royal Society; attended Le Felure's course of chemistry at
Paris in 1647, was skilled in more than one musical instrument,
learned dancing and, above all, devoted himself to horticulture.
When travelling abroad, he made a point of visiting the
cabinets' of collectors, for, at that time, public museums, which,
in fact, grew out of these cabinets, were non-existent. The follow-
ing quotation records the sort of curiosities at which men marvelled
in the year 1645 :
Feb. 4th. We were invited to the collection of exotic rarities in the
museum of Ferdinando Imperati, a Neapolitan nobleman, and one of the
most observable palaces in the citty, the repository of incomparable rarities,
Amongst the naturall herbals most remarkable was the Byssus marina and
Pinna marina; the male and female cameleon; an Onacratulus; an extra-
ordinary greate crocodile; some of the Orcades Anates, held here for a great
rarity; likewise a salamander; the male and female Manucodiata, the male
having an hollow in the back, in wch 'tis reported the female both layes and
batches her egg; the mandragoras of both sexes; Papyrus made of severall
reedes, and some of silke; tables of the rinds of trees written wth Japonią
characters; another of the branches of palme; many Indian fruites; a
chrystal that had a quantity of uncongealed water within its cavity; a petri.
fied fisher's net; divers sorts of tarantulas, being a monstrous spider with
lark-like clawes, and somewhat bigger.
But Evelyn's chief contribution to science, as already indicated,
was horticultural. He was devoted to his garden, and, both at his
native Wotton, and, later, at Sayes court, Deptford, spent much time
in planting and planning landscape gardens, then much the fashion.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the fact that 'nitre'
promoted the growth of plants was beginning to be recognised.
Sir Kenelm Digby and the young Oxonian John Mayow, experi-
mented de Sal-Nitro; and, in 1675, Evelyn writes: 'I firmly
believe that where saltpetre can be obtained in plenty we should
not need to find other composts to ameliorate our ground. ' His
1 See ante, chap. x.
## p. 355 (#377) ############################################
Evelyn and Pepys
355
well known Sylva, published in 1664, had an immediate and a
widespread effect, and was, for many years, the standard book on
the subject of the culture of trees. It is held to be responsible for
a great outbreak of tree-planting. The introduction to Nisbet's
edition gives figures which demonstrate the shortage in the avail-
able supply of oak timber during the seventeenth century. The
charm of Evelyn's style and the practical nature of his book, which
ran into four editions before the author's death, arrested this
decline ('be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when
ye're sleeping' as the laird of Dumbiedykes counselled his son),
and to the Sylva of John Evelyn is largely due the fact that the
oaken timber used for the British ships which fought the French in
the eighteenth century sufficed, but barely sufficed, for the national
needs.
Pepys, whose naïve and frank self-revelations have made him the
most popular and the most frequently read of diarists, was not quite
of the same class of student to which lord Herbert of Cherbury or
John Evelyn belonged. But, gifted as he was with an undying and
insatiable curiosity, nothing was too trivial or too odd for his
notice and his record; and, being an exceptionally able and hard-
working government servant, he took great interest in anything
which was likely to affect the navy. He discoursed with the
ingenious Dr Kuffler "about his design to blow up ships' noticed
the strange nature of the sea-water in a dark night, that it seemed
like fire upon every stroke of the oar'-an effect due, of course, to
phosphorescent organisms floating near the surface—and interested
himself incessantly in marine matters. His troubled eyesight and
his love of music account for the attention he paid to optical
appliances, the structure of the eye, musical instruments of every
kind and musical notation; for this last, he seems to have invented
a system which is still preserved at Magdalene college, but which
no one now understands.
Physiology and mortuary objects had, for him, an interest which
was almost morbid. He is told that 'negroes drounded look white,
and lose their blackness, which I never heard before,' describes how
‘one of a great family was. . . hanged with a silken halter. . . of his
own preparing, not for the honour only' but because it strangles
more quickly. He attended regularly the early meetings of the
Royal Society at Gresham college, and showed the liveliest interest
in various investigations on the transfusion of blood, respiration
under reduced air pressure and many other ingenious experiments
1 See ante, chap. . .
a
23-2
## p. 356 (#378) ############################################
356
The Progress of Science
2
and observations by Sir George Ent and others. On 20 January
1665, he took home Micrographia, Hooke's book on microscopy-
'a most excellent piece, of which I am very proud. '
Although Pepys had no scientific training-he only began to
learn the multiplication table when he was in his thirtieth year,
but, later, took the keenest pleasure in teaching it to Mrs Pepys-
he, nevertheless, attained to the presidentship of the Royal Society.
He had always delighted in the company of the virtuosos' and, in
1662, three years after he began to study arithmetic, he was
admitted a fellow of their—the Royal Society. In 1681, he was
elected president. This post he owed, not to any genius for science,
or to any great invention or generalisation, but to his very ex-
ceptional powers as an organiser and as a man of business, to his
integrity and to the abiding interest he ever showed in the cause
of the advancement of knowledge.
If we pass from the interest taken in scientific progress by men
of superior intelligence to the obstacles opposed to it by popular
ignorance and superstition, we are brought face to face with the
long-lived crew of witches, wizards and alchemists. It is often
said that the more rationalistic outlook of the seventeenth century,
due to Hobbes and others, did much to discredit these practitioners.
But the observant dwellers in our cities or remote country villages,
pestered as they are with advertisements of those who practise
palmistry, and of those who predict the future by crystal-gazing
or by the fall of sand, of followers of the sporting prophet,
and of far more presumptuous and more dangerous impostors,
or confronted by the silent, indomitable belief of the rustic in
the witchery of his ancestors, may well hold the opinion that the
stock of superstition is a constant stock and permeates now, as it
did in Elizabeth's time, every class of society. What improvement
there was in the seventeenth century, and it is extremely doubtful
if there was much, was largely due to the advent of James I and
the later rise of puritanism, associated as they were with the most
cruel and most inhuman torture of sorcerers. When the alchemist
and the astrologer ran the risk of suffering as a sorcerer or a
warlock, he paused before publicly embarking on the trade.
Under the Tudors, the laws against witchcraft were milder than
those of other countries, but, under James I, these laws were
repealed and he himself took-as he had done before in Scotland -
an active part in this cruel and senseless persecution. During the
first eighty years of the seventeenth century, no less than 70,000
men and women are said to have been executed for alleged offences
## p. 357 (#379) ############################################
Witches, Astrologers and Alchemists 357
under the new act. The king even wrote a book on demonology,
attacking the more sensible and reasonable views of Scot and
Wier. It must be remembered, however, that, in these times, the
generality of learned and able men believed in the maleficent effects
of sorcery and the black art. The bench of bishops and the bench
of judges alike took part in what seems to us a hideous and wanton
brutality. Even so great a writer as Sir Thomas Browne, who tells
us, ‘for the sorrows of others he has quick sympathy,' gave evidence
against two unhappy women charged before Sir Matthew Hale at
Bury St Edmunds, and his evidence helped to secure their iniquitous
conviction.
Browne, like many of his day, was a firm believer in horoscopes—
'I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn and I think I have a
piece of that leaden planet in me. ' He was, however, perhaps
a little in advance of some of his contemporaries; at any rate, he
recognised that foretellings based on star-gazing do not always
'make good. We deny not the influence of the stars but often
suspect the due application thereof. During the civil war, both
sides used astrologers and acted on their prognostications ; but, on
the whole, the firm belief that future events could be foretold by a
study of the planetary system was waning. They' (i. e. the stars)
'incline but do not compel. . . and so gently incline that a wise man
may resist them; sapiens dominabitur astris : they rule but God
rules them? ' This was said by Robert Burton, and it probably
represents the average opinion of the more educated in our period.
The part played by alchemy in the life of the times can be
judged by Ben Jonson’s Alchemist, first acted in 1610%, which
affords a true insight into the fashionable craze of the time. The
play was constantly presented from that date until the closing of
the theatres and, on the restoration, was one of the first plays to
be revived. Jonson certainly had mastered the jargon of this form
of quackery, and showed a profound knowledge of the art of its
professors. In Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, he refers to the
love philtres of one Forman, a most flagrant rascal who was mixed
up with the Overbury trial.
It has been said that a competent man of science should be able
to put into language 'understanded of the people’ any problem, no
matter how complex, at which he is working. This seems hardly
possible in the twentieth century. To explain to a trained histologist
1 Anatomy of Melancholy, part 1, sec, 11, Mem. 1, seo. ,
2 Cf. ante, vol. vi, chap. I, pp. 22–23.
## p. 358 (#380) ############################################
358 The Progress of Science
double functions or to a skilled mathematician the intricacies of
karyokinesis would take a very long time. The introduction in all
the sciences of technical words is not due to any spirit of per-
verseness on the part of modern savants; these terms, long as they
usually are, serve as the shorthand of science. In the Stewart
times, however, an investigator could explain in simple language
to his friends what he was doing and the advance of natural science
was keenly followed by all sorts and conditions of men.
Whatever were the political and moral deficiencies of the
Stewart kings, no one of them lacked intelligence in things artistic
and scientific. The pictures at Windsor and at Buckingham palace
which the nation owes to Charles I and Charles II are only
approached by those it owes to the knowledge and taste of queen
Victoria's consort. At Whitehall, Charles II had his little elabo-
'
ratory, under bis closet, a pretty place',' and was working there but
a day or two before his death, his illness disinclining him for his
wonted exercise. The king took a curious interest in anatomy; on
11 May 1663, Pierce, the surgeon, tells Pepys that the other day
Dr Clerke and he did dissect two bodies, a man and a woman
before the King with which the King was highly pleased. ' Pepys
also records, 17 February 1662/3, on the authority of Edward
Pickering, another story of a dissection in the royal closet by the
king's own hands.
It has, I think, seldom been pointed out that Charles II's
ancestry accounts for many of his qualities and especially for his
interest in science. He was very unlike his father, but his mother
was the daughter of a Medici princess, and the characteristics of
that family are strongly marked in the 'merry monarch. ' His gaiety
and wit and his skill in money matters when he chose to apply
himself, all bring to mind the Italian family from which he sprang?
Another royal personage, prince Rupert, 'full of spirit and
action, full of observation and judgement,' about this time invented
his 'chemical glasses which break all to dust by breaking off a
little small end: which is a great mystery to me? ' He had,
6
1 Pepys, 15 Jan. 1669.
Even the swarthy complexion of Charles II was probably due to his Italian blood,
and his fondness for outdoor sports is another trait which is often observed in the
Medici themselves. There is an old engraving of a portrait of Lorenzo (d. 1648),
the brother of Cosimo II, which shows an astonishing resemblance to Charles II; and
it is interesting to remember that Cosimo II earned his chief claim to the gratitude
of posterity by his courageous encouragement, protection and support of Galileo, who
owed to him the opportunity and means of making his famous astronomical discoveries.
3 Pepys, 13 Jan. 1662.
## p. 359 (#381) ############################################
Worcester. Kenelm Digby.
Wallis 359
says Gramont, quelques talens for chemistry and invented a new
method for making gunpowder, for making 'hails hot' and for
boring cannon. His traditional invention of the almost lost art of
mezzotint is probably due to the fact that, at an early date, the real
inventor, Ludwig von Siegen, explained to him his process and that
prince Rupert demonstrated with his own hands this new method
of engraving to Evelyn.
Another aristocratic inventor, Edward Somerset, second marquis
of Worcester, has received more credit than he deserved. He was
interested in mechanics and employed a skilled mechanician, one
Kaltoff, in his laboratory, but his claims to have invented a steam-
engine do not bear critical investigation, and his well known Cen-
tury of Inventions does not rise to the level of The Boy's Own
Book of the last century. Many of his suggestions, though ingenious,
are based on fallacies, and comparatively few of them were practical.
A curiously versatile amateur in science was Sir Kenelm Digby,
of whom mention has already been made elsewhere? . Like most
prominent men of his time, he intervened in theological questions,
besides playing an active part in public affairs. He was an original
member of the Royal Society, but, although he is reported to have
been the first to record the importance of the 'vital air'—we now
call it oxygen—to plants, and although he had gifts of observation,
his work lay largely in the paths of alchemy and astrology, and he
seems to have had recourse to a lively imagination in estimating
the results of his experiments. He trafficked in the transmutation
of metals, and his name was long associated with a certain powder
of sympathy' which, like the 'absent treatment of the twentieth
century practitioners of Christian science, 'acted at a distance. '
Evelyn looked on him as a quack, 'a teller of strange things,' and
lady Fanshawe refers to his infirmity of lying; he was certainly a
great talker. Still, other men of his epoch spoke well of him and
his conversation was doubtless stimulating if profuse.
6
3
6
>
In mathematics, John Wallis was, to some extent, a forerunner
of Newton. At Felsted school and at Emmanuel college, he re-
ceived the curiously wide education of his age. He was a skilled
linguist; although he had taken holy orders, he was the first of
Francis Glisson's pupils to proclaim in public Harvey's discovery
of the circulation of the blood, but his bent was towards mathe-
matics, and he possessed an extraordinary memory for figures. His
Arithmetica Infinitorum is described as “the most stimulating
See ante, vol. VII, chap. IX, pp. 222—3.
6
## p. 360 (#382) ############################################
360 The Progress of Science
mathematical work so far published in England. ' It contained the
germs of the differential calculus, and it suggested to Newton, who
'read it with delight,' the binomial theorem. In it was evaluated,
and it must not be forgotten that to Wallis we owe the symbol for
infinity, co. Living in troublesome times, under many rulers, he con-
trived, not without some loss of popularity, to remain on good terms
with all. His services were, indeed, indispensable to a succession
of governments, for he had a power of deciphering which was
almost miraculous.
Cromwell, who seems to have had a great
respect for his powers, appointed him Savilian professor of geometry
at Oxford in 1649.
Another mathematical ecclesiastic was Seth Ward, bishop of
Exeter and afterwards of Salisbury. Ward was educated at
Sidney Sussex college and. in 1643, was chosen as mathematical
lecturer to the university at Cambridge. But, like Wallis, he
was appointed, and in the same year, to a Savilian professor-
ship, that of astronomy-another instance, not uncommon at
the time, of men educated at Cambridge but recognised and
promoted at Oxford. He took the place of the ejected John
Greaves, who magnanimously used his influence in his successor's
favour. Ward was renowned as a preacher; but his later fame
rested chiefly on his contributions to the science of astronomy, and
he is remembered in the world of science mainly for his theory of
planetary motion. Ward and Wallis—but the burden of the attack
was borne by the latter-laid bare Hobbes's attempted proof of the
squaring of the circle; there was also a little controversy 'on the
duplication of the cube,' and mixed up with these criticisms in the
realm of pure reason were political motives. Hobbes had not
begun to study Euclid until he was forty; and, after Sir Henry
Savile had founded his professorships at Oxford, Wood says that
not a few of the foolish gentry ‘kept back their sons' in order not
'to have them smutted by the black art'-80 great was the fear
and the ignorance of the powers of mathematics. Ward was a
pluralist, as was the manner of the times, and Burnet tells us 'he
was a profound statesman but a very indifferent clergyman. ' Yet,
what money he got he lavishly spent on ecclesiastical and other
purposes
1 As bishop of Exeter, he restored, at the cost of £25,000, the cathedral; repaired
the palace; considerably increased the value of the poorer benefices of his diocese and
of the prebends of his cathedral; and gave a considerable sum of money towards the
cost of making the river navigable from his cathedral city to the sea. He founded the
Seth Ward almshouses at Salisbury, and he gave certain farms and fee-farm rents for
scholarships at Christ's college, Cambridge.
a
## p. 361 (#383) ############################################
Newton and Harvey
361
Like the distinguished mathematicians just mentioned, Isaac
Newton took a keen interest in certain forms of theology current in
his day; but in his intellectual powers he surpassed not only them
but all living mathematicians and those who lived after him. His
supreme genius
has ensured him a place in the very small list of the
world's thinkers of the first order. He, too, exercised a certain
influence in affairs, and, during his later years, he took a keen interest
in theological speculations; but his activities in these fields are com-
pletely overshadowed by the far-reaching importance of his great
discoveries as a natural philosopher and a mathematician. As the
discoverer of the decomposition of white light in the spectrum, he
may be regarded as the founder of the modern science of optics.
His discovery of the law of gravitation, and his application of it to 2
the explanation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion and of the
principal inequalities in the orbital motion of the moon made him
the founder of the science of gravitational astronomy. His dis-
covery of the method of fluxions entitles him to rank with Leibniz
as one of the founders of mathematical analysis. All these great 3
discoveries gave rise to long and sometimes acrimonious con-
troversies among his contemporaries, relating both to the subjects
themselves and to priority of discovery. In a letter to Halley
referring to one of these disputes, Newton writes :
Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady, that a man has as
good be engaged in lawsuits, as have to do with her. I found it so formerly,
and now I am no sooner come near her again, but she gives me warning.
His chief work, Principia, has been described by dean Peacock as
'the greatest single triumph of the human mind. '
The second man of outstanding genius in British science in the
seventeenth century was Harvey, who, like Newton, worked in one
of the two sciences which, in Stewart times, were, to some extent,
ahead of all the others. Harvey, 'the little choleric man' as
Aubrey calls him, was educated at Cambridge and at Padua and
was in his thirty-eighth year when, in his lectures on anatomy, he
expounded his new doctrine of the circulation of the blood to the
college of Physicians, although his Exercitatio on this subject did
not appear till 1628. His notes for the lectures are now in the
British Museum. He was physician to Charles I; and it is on record
how, during the battle of Edgehill, he looked after the young
princes as he sat reading a book under a hedge a little removed
from the fight.
In the chain of evidence of his convincing demonstration of the
1 Newton held the office of president of the Royal Society for the last twenty-five
years of his life, a period exceeded only in the case of one president, Sir Joseph Banks.
9
## p. 362 (#384) ############################################
362 The Progress of Science
>
circulation of the blood, one link, only to be supplied by the
invention of the compound microscope, was missing. This, the
discovery of the capillaries, was due to Malpighi, who was amongst
the earliest anatomists to apply the compound microscope to
animal tissues. Still, as Dryden has it,
The circling streams once thought but pools of blood
(Whether life's fuel or the body's food),
From dark oblivion Harvey's name shall save 1.
Harvey was happy in two respects as regards his discovery,
It was, in the main and especially in England, recognised as proven
in his own lifetime, and, again, no one of credit claimed or asserted
the claim of others to priority. In research, all enquirers stand on
steps others have built up; but, in this, the most important of
single contributions to physiology, the credit is Harvey's and almost
Harvey's alone. His other great work, Exercitationes de Genera-
tione Animalium, is of secondary importance. It shows marvellous
powers of observation and very laborious research ; but, although,
to a great extent, it led the way in embryology, it was shortly
superseded by works of those who had the compound microscope at
their command. Cowley, a man of wide culture, wrote an Ode on
Harvey in which his achievement was contrasted with a failing
common to scientific men of his own time, and, so far as we can see,
of all time:
Harvey sought for Truth in Truth's own Book
The Creatures, which by God Himself was writ;
And wisely thought 'twas fit,
Not to read Comments only upon it,
But on th' original it self to look.
Methinks in Arts great Circle, others stand
Lock't up together, Hand in Hand,
Every one leads as he is led,
The same bare path they tread,
A Dance like Fairies a Fantastick round,
But neithor change their motion, nor their ground:
Had Harvey to this Road confin'd his wit,
His noble Circle of the Blood, had been untroden yet.
Harvey's death is recorded in a characteristic seventeenth
century sentence, taken from the unpublished pages of Baldwin
Harvey's Bustorum Aliquot Reliquiae :
Of William Harvey, the most fortunate anatomist, the blood ceased to
move on the third day of the Ides of June, in the year 1657, the continuous
movement of which in all men, moreover he had most truly asserted . . .
"Εν τι τροχώ πάντες και εν πάσι τροχοί.
1 Epistle to Dr Charleton.
? The writer is indebted for this quotation to Dr Norman Moore's History of the
Study of Medicine in the British Isles, Oxford, 1908.
## p. 363 (#385) ############################################
Mayerne. Mayow. Sydenham. Glisson 363
Among other great physiologists and physicians, Sir Theodore
Turquet de Mayerne (godson of Theodore Beza), who settled in
London in 1611, has left us Notes of the diseases of the great which,
to the medically minded, are of the greatest interest. He almost
diagnosed enteric, and his observations on the fatal illness of
Henry, prince of Wales, and the memoir he drew up in 1623 on
the health of James I, alike leave little to be desired in complete-
ness or in accuracy of detail.
Before bringing to a close these short notices of those who studied
and wrote on the human body, whole or diseased, a few lines must
be given to John Mayow of Oxford, who followed the law,'especially
in the summer time at Bath. Yet, from his contributions to
science, one might well suppose that he had devoted his whole
time to research in chemistry and physiology. He it was who
showed that, in respiration, not the whole air but a part only of the
air breathed in takes an active part in respiration, though he called
this part by a different name, he meant what we now call oxygen. '
Thomas Sydenham was one of the first physicians who was
convinced of the importance of constant and prolonged observation
at the bedside of the patient. He passed by all authority but
one-'the divine old man Hippocrates,' whose medicine rested also
on observation. He, first in England, 'attempted to arrive at
general laws about the prevalence and the course and the treat-
ment of disease from clinical observation. He was essentially
'
a physician occupied in diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. When
he was but 25 years old, he began to suffer from gout, and his
personal experience enabled him to write a classic on this disease,
which is even now unsurpassed.
Francis Glisson, like Sydenham, was essentially English in his
upbringing, and did not owe anything to foreign education. His
work on the liver has made 'Glisson's capsule' known to every
medical student, and he wrote an authoritative book on rickets.
He, like Harvey, was educated at Gonville and Caius college, and,
in 1636, became regius professor of physic at Cambridge, but the
greater part of his life he spent at Colchester. We must perforce
pass by the fashionable Thomas Willis and his more capable
assistant Richard Lower, with Sir George Ent, and others.
Great as were the seventeenth century philosophers in the
biological and medical sciences, they were paralleled if not
surpassed by workers on the physical and mathematical side.
Robert Boyle was, even as a boy of eighteen, one of the
· Foster, Sir Michael, The History of Physiology, Cambridge, 1901.
6
## p. 364 (#386) ############################################
364 The Progress of Science
leaders in the comparatively new pursuit of experimental science.
His first love was chemistry, 'Vulcan has so transported and
bewitched me as to make me fancy my laboratory a kind of
Elysium,' thus he wrote in 1649. A few years later (1652–3), in
Ireland, where he was called to look after the family estates, he
found it hard to have any Hermetic thoughts,' and occupied his
mind with anatomy and confirming Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of the blood. A year later, he settled at Oxford, where
he arranged a laboratory and had as assistant Robert Hooke.
Meetings were held alternately at Boyle's lodgings and at John
Wilkins's lodge at Wadham, and were frequented by Seth Ward
and Christopher Wren and by many others.
Stimulated by Otto von Guericke's contrivance for exhausting
air from a vessel, Boyle, aided by Hooke, invented what was called
the 'machina Boyliana,' which comprised the essentials of the air-
pump of today. At this time, Boyle busied himself with the
weight, with the pressure and with the elasticity of air—the part
it played in respiration and in acoustics. Like Newton, he took a
deep interest in theology, and not only spent considerable sums in
translating the Bible into foreign tongues, but learnt Greek, Hebrew,
Syriac and Chaldee so that he might read it at first hand. He
was, indeed, a very notable character. Suffering under continued
ill-health, with weak eyes, a slight stammer, and a memory
treacherous to the last degree, he was yet one of the most helpful
of friends and universally popular alike at the court of three
kings, and in the society of men of letters, men of business and
men of science. In spite of the fact that he was the first to
distinguish a mixture from a compound, to define an element, to
prepare hydrogen, though he did not recognise its nature, he had
in him the touch of an amateur, but an amateur of genius. His
style in writing was unusually prolix and he seldom followed out
his discoveries to their ultimate end.
It was men such as these that reestablished the Royal Society
in 1660. Exactly a century earlier, the first scientific society, the
Academia Secretorum Naturae of Naples had its origin. This
was followed by several others, most of them but shortlived, in
Italy and in France. Among English or Teutonic folk, the Royal
Society was the earliest to appear, and, even if we include the
scientific societies of the world, it has had the most continuous
existence. Indeed, before its birth, it underwent a long period of
incubation, and its inception was in reality in 1645. At that date,
a society known as the Philosophical, or, as Boyle called it, the
## p. 365 (#387) ############################################
Cowley and the Royal Society 365
>
'Invisible,' college came into being, which met from time to
time at Gresham college and elsewhere in London, During
the civil war, this society was split in two, some members
meeting in London, some at Oxford, but the meetings, wher-
ever held, were at irregular intervals. On the restoration, the
meetings were resumed in London and, in 1662, the society
received the royal charter.
Of all the poets of the time, Cowley took, perhaps, the greatest
interest in science. He had, indeed, like Evelyn and at about the
same date, developed a plan for the institution of a college of
science. Evelyn explains his scheme in a letter addressed to Robert
Boyle, dated 3 September 1659 from Sayes court, which contains
minute details as to the buildings, the maintenance, and the
government of his college, the inmates of which were to preserve
science and cultivate themselves. ' Cowley's scheme was also
elaborately thought out, and had the original and admirable
suggestion that, out of the twenty salaried professors, sixteen
should be always resident and four always travelling in the four
quarters of the world, in order that they might 'give a constant
account of all things that belong to the learning and especially
Natural Experimental Philosophy, of those parts. ' To his 'Philo-
sophical Colledge' was to be attached a school of two hundred
boys. Both these schemes, according to bishop Sprat, hastened
the foundation of the Royal Society, of which both projectors were
original members.
Cowley's poems were greatly admired during his lifetime, later
critics have considered him affected, perhaps because, like Donne,
he understood, and was not afraid to use the technical language of
the schools. We have quoted some of his lines on Harvey, and
may add a few from the ode with which he greeted the birth of
the Royal Society :
From . . all long Errors of the way,
In which our Praedecessors went,
And like th’ old Hebrews many years did stray
In Desarts but of small extent,
Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last
The barren Wilderness he past,
Did on the very Border stand
Of the blest promis'd Land,
And from the Mountains Top of his Exalted Wit,
Saw it himself, and shewed us it.
But Life did never to one Man allow
Time to Discover Worlds, and Conquer too;
Nor can so short a Line sufficient be
To fadome the vast depths of Natures Sea:
## p. 366 (#388) ############################################
366
The Progress of Science
The work he did we ought t'admire,
And were unjust if we should more require
From his few years, divided 'twixt th’ Excess
Of low Affliction, and high Happiness.
For who on things remote can fix his sight,
That's alwayes in a Triumph, or a Fight?
Donne, who, like Cowley, indulged in quaint poetical conceits
and who founded a new school of poetry, abjuring classical con-
ventions and classical characters, and treating of topics and objects
of everyday life, was not afraid of realism. 'Upon common objects,
Dr Johnson tells us, he was ‘unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle. '
Space limits us to one quotation:
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee.
Donne did not of course foresee the appalling part that these insects,
by the habits he mentions, play in the spread of such diseases
as bubonic plague and many epizootics in animals.
The dramatists of the Stewart period hardly afford us the help
we need in estimating the position occupied by science and by men
of science in the world of the seventeenth century. The astrologer
and the alchemist were then stock characters of the drama of
everyday life, just as the company promoter is now. "The Gentle-
“
men of Trinity Colledge' presented before the King's Majesty'a
comedy entitled Albumazar, which takes its name from the chief
character, an astrologer, a very arrant knave, and the type of the
false man of science. This play, originally printed in 1615, was soon
forgotten, but it was revived in 1668 and met with great success.
Samuel Butler, who was not a fellow of the Royal Society, for
some reason difficult to explain, spent much time in attacking it.
He wrote his entertaining satire on the virtuosi entitled The
Elephant in the Moon in short verse, and was so pleased with
it that he wrote it over again in long verse? Though this 'Satire
upon the Royal Society' remains a fragment, enough of it is extant
to show Butler did not appreciate what even in these days is not
always appreciated, that the minute investigation of subjects and
objects which to the ordinary man seem trivial and vain often lead
to discoveries of the profoundest import to mankind.
Ben Jonson, with his flair for presenting what zoologists
call 'type species,' showed, as has been seen, in his Alchemist
6
Cf. ante, chap. II.
## p. 367 (#389) ############################################
Political Economists
367
a
an unusual, but a thorough, mastery of the half scientific and
half quack jargon of the craft, so that this play is a quarry for
all interested in the history of chemical and physical studies.
To the play-writer of the time, the man of science or of pseudo-
science was a vague, peevish pedant, much occupied with physio-
gnomies, dreams and fantastic ideas as to the properties and powers
of various substances. But there seems to have been a clear
distinction drawn between a real and a false astrology, as is shown
in Dryden's An Evening's Love (1668)".
The political economists of the seventeenth century
were greatly influenced by the Baconian enthusiasm for empirical study;
they were eager to accumulate and interpret facts, and to apply inductive
methods to political phenomena. They therefore concerned themselves with
the anatomy of the body politic, and with numerical observations which
served as the best available substitute for experiment. They followed the
analogy of the biological rather than of the mathematical science of their
day; hence, their mode of thought has a close affinity with that which has
become current since the decline of the classical school of Political Economy.
Sir William Petty and the philosopher Locke are the best
known names in this group of political economists. Locke, in
particular, was interested in questions concerning the currency and
the rate of interest. Sir William Petty, who was among the first to
state clearly the nature of rent, wrote a celebrated Treatise of
Taxes and Contributions Captain John Graunt's Natural and
Political Observations marked the beginning of that interest in
statistical data concerning health and population which is a dis-
tinguishing feature of modern economic research. Another writer,
Samuel Fortrey, followed Petty in his endeavour to go behind the
mere art of taxation and analyse the ultimate sources of national
wealth in the land and labour of the country. In general, it may
be said that, in the seventeenth century, political economy was still
an art rather than a science. Between these writings and Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), there was a great gap; but the
practical observations of the seventeenth century were not without
use in supplying material for his scholarly and impartial analysis.
i Cf. ante, chap. I.
? Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. a1, p. 380.
? Cf. ante, chap. xiv.
## p. 368 (#390) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
THE ESSAY AND THE BEGINNING OF MODERN
ENGLISH PROSE
PERHAPS the most important literary achievement that falls
within the period covered by this volume is the creation of a prose
style, which, in structure if not in vocabulary, is essentially the
same as that of today. Caroline prose, the prose of Milton and
Taylor, of Browne and Clarendon, had produced, in the hands of
genius, some of the noblest passages in our literature. But, at the
restoration, men began to feel the need of an instrument upon
which the everyday performer might play-an instrument suited
to an age of reason, possessing, before all things, the homely virtues
of simplicity, correctness, lucidity and precision. These qualities,
indeed, were not unknown to English prose before the restoration.
They are to be found in private letters, not meant for the public
eye. Above all, they are to be found in the writings of the veteran
Hobbes, who, like Bacon and Ben Jonson, with both of whom he
had literary relations, disdained all superfluity of ornament, and
was content to make his prose a terse and pregnant expression of
a clear and vigorous intellect. But even Hobbes is by no means
free from the besetting sins of the older prose-careless construc-
tion and trailing relative clauses.
The new prose was the work of a multiplicity of causes, all
more or less reflecting the temper of the age. One of these was
the growing interest in science, and the insistence of the new
Royal Society on the need of a clear and plain style for scientific
exposition.
There is one thing more about which the Society has been most solicitous;
and that is the manner of their Discourse: which, unless they had been only
watchful to keep in due temper, the whole spirit and vigour of their Design
had been soon eaten out by the luxury and redundance of speech. . . . And, in
few words, I dare say that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner
obtain'd than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this
volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. . . . It will
suffice my present purpose to point out what has been done by the Royal
## p. 369 (#391) ############################################
Demand for Simplicity and Clearness 369
j
Society towards the correcting of excesses in Natural Philosophy, to which
it is of all others, a most profest enemy. They have therefore been most
vigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this
extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all ampli-
fication, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive
purity and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal
number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked,
natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native eas'ness,
bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and
preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before
that of Wits or Scholars.
So writes Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society. Almost
at the same time, in December 1664, his colleagues gave effect to
their views by appointing a committee for the improvement of the
English language, which included, besides himself, Waller, Dryden
and Evelyn'. Doubtless, it was out of this committee that the idea
arose of founding an English academy for the 'improvement of
speaking and writing' on the model of the French one. This idea
was discussed at three or four meetings held at Gray's inn, where,
in addition to the above, Cowley and the duke of Buckingham,
also members of the Royal Society, were present. But, in con-
sequence of the plague and 'other circumstances intervening,' the
plan came to nothing? '
The same need for greater plainness and simplicity of language
was felt in pulpit oratory so far back as 1646, when Wilkins, after-
wards bishop of Chester, one of the founders of the Royal Society,
and its first secretary, had recommended, in his popular Eccle-
siastes or the Gift of Preaching, that the style of preaching should
be plain and without rhetorical flourishes. After the restoration,
these views found an adequate exponent in his friend John
Tillotson, whose sermons at Lincoln's inn and St Lawrence Jewry
attracted large congregations. His St Paul's sermon, preached
before the lord mayor, in March 1664, and printed by request
under the title The Wisdom of being religious, is, in its perfect
plainness and absence of rhetoric, an instructive contrast to the
brilliantly imaginative discourse which Jeremy Taylor delivered,
only eight months earlier, at the funeral of archbishop Bramhall.
But the reformation of pulpit oratory was not the work of one
2
1 Evelyn embodied his views in a letter to the chairman, Sir Peter Wyche, which
is printed in J. E. Spingarn’s Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, vol. II,
pp. 310 ff.
Evelyn to Pepys (op. cit. vol. II, pp. 327 ff. ). As to the origin of the Royal Society
see, also, ante, chap. xv.
3 Cf. , as to the change in the style of pulpit oratory, ante, chap. XII.
* See ante, ib.
E. L. VIII. CH, XVI.
24
## p. 370 (#392) ############################################
370 The Essay and Modern English Prose
.
sermon or one man. Both Stillingfleet, reader at the Temple, who
was even more popular than Tillotson, and South, public orator at
Oxford, who was made a prebendary of Westminster in 1663,
belonged to the modern school. In a sermon preached on Ascen-
sion day 1667, the latter divine commended apostolic preaching for
its plainness and simplicity :
nothing here of the finger of the North-star . . . nothing of the door of angel's
wings or the beautiful locks of cherubims: no starched similitudes, intro-
duced with a 'thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion,' and
the like.
This ungenerous hit at Jeremy Taylor, who was lately dead, well
marks the antithesis between the new age and the old, between wit
and poetry, between reason and imagination.
Dryden's statement that‘if he had any talent for English prose
it was owing to his having often read the writings of the great
archbishop Tillotson' must be regarded as a piece of generous
exaggeration. At the most, he can only have learnt from him the
virtues of clear and logical statement, and of short, well coordi-
nated sentences. In the epistle dedicatory of The Rival-Ladies
(1664), and in the earlier part of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie
written in the summer of 1665, his management of the clause is
still somewhat uncertain. It is not till Neander, who represents
Dryden, joins in the discussion that we recognise our first master
of modern prose.
