Part 9

In 1652 he went to Ireland to look after his property, and spent the greater part of the next two years there. Returning to England in 1654, he settled at Oxford. That which especially directed him to this place, besides its being generally suited to the prosecution of all his literary and philosophical pursuits, was the presence of that knot of learned men, from whom the Royal Society took its rise. It consisted of a few only, but those eminent; Bishop Wilkins, Wallis, Ward, Wren, and others, who used to meet for the purpose of conferring upon philosophical subjects, and mutually communicating and reasoning on their respective experiments and discoveries.

At the restoration, Boyle was treated with great respect by the King; and was strongly pressed to enter the church by Lord Clarendon, who thought that his high birth, eminent learning, and exemplary character might be of material service to the revived establishment. After serious consideration he declined the proposal, upon two accounts, as he told Burnet; first, because he thought that while he performed no ecclesiastical duties, and received no pay, his testimony in favour of religion would carry more weight; secondly, because he felt no especial vocation to take holy orders, which he considered indispensable to the proper entering into that service.

From this time forwards, Boyle’s life is not much more than the history of his works. It passed in an even current of tranquil happiness, and diligent employment, little broken, except by illness, from which he was a great sufferer. At an early age, he was attacked by the stone, and continued through life subject to paroxysms of that dreadful disease: and in 1670, he was afflicted with a severe paralytic complaint, from which he fortunately recovered without sustaining any mental injury. On the incorporation of the Royal Society in 1663, he was named as one of the council, in the charter; and as he had been one of the original members, so through his life he continued to publish his shorter treatises in their Transactions. In 1662 he was appointed by the King, Governor of the Corporation for propagating the Gospel in New England. The diffusion of Christianity was a favourite subject of exertion with him through life. For the sole purpose of exerting a more effectual influence in introducing it into India, he became a Director of the East India Company; and, at his own expense, caused the Gospels and Acts to be translated into Malay, and five hundred copies to be printed and sent abroad. He also caused a translation of the Bible into Irish to be made and published, at an expense of £700; and bore great part of the expense of a similar undertaking in the Welsh language. To other works of the same sort he was a liberal contributor: and as in speech and writing he was a zealous, yet temperate advocate of religion, so he showed his sincerity by a ready extension of his ample funds to all objects which tended to promote the religious welfare of his fellow-creatures.

In the year 1666 he took up his abode in London, where he continued for the remainder of his life. We have little more to state of his personal history. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1680, but declined that well-earned honour, as having, in his own words, “a great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths.” In the course of 1688 he began to feel his strength decline, and set himself seriously to complete those of his undertakings which he judged most important, and to arrange such of his papers as required to be prepared for publication. It gives us rather a curious notion of the scientific morality of the day, to learn that he had been a great sufferer by the stealing of his papers. Such at least was his own belief, hinted in a public advertisement, and expressed more fully in his private communications. His manuscript books disappeared in an incomprehensible way, insomuch that he resolved to write upon loose sheets of paper, “that the ignorance of the coherence might keep men from thinking them worth stealing.” Notwithstanding he complains of numerous losses, and expresses a determination to secure the “remaining part of his writings, especially those that contain most matters of fact, by sending them maimed and unfinished, as they come to hand, to the press.” A still more serious loss occurred to him through the carelessness of a servant, who broke a bottle of vitriol over a box of manuscripts prepared for publication, by which a large part of them were utterly ruined. To these misfortunes, the non-appearance of many promised works, and the imperfect state of others, is to be ascribed. During the years 1689–90, he gradually withdrew himself more and more from his other employments, and from the claims of society, to devote himself entirely to the preparation of his papers. He died, unmarried, December 31, 1691, aged sixty-five years, and was buried in the chancel of St. Martin’s-in-the-fields.

To give merely the dates and titles of Boyle’s several publications, would occupy several pages. They are collected in five volumes folio, by Dr. Birch, and amount in number to ninety-seven. The philosophical works have been abridged in three volumes quarto by Dr. Shaw, who has prefixed to his edition a character of the author, and of his works. From 1660 to the end of his life, every year brought fresh evidence of his close application to science, and the versatility of his talents, and the extent of his knowledge. His attention was directed to chemistry, mathematics, mechanics, medicine, anatomy; but more especially to the former, in its many branches: and though he is not altogether free from the reproach of credulity, and appears not to have entirely freed himself from the delusions of the alchymists, still he did more towards overthrowing their mischievous doctrines, and establishing his favourite science on a firm foundation, than any man; and his indefatigable diligence in inquiry, and unquestioned honesty of relation, entitle him to a very high place among the fathers of modern chemistry. On this point we may quote the testimony of the celebrated Boerhaave, (Chemistry, vol. i. p. 55,) who says, that among the writers who have treated of Chemistry with a view to natural philosophy and medicine, we may reckon among the chief, the Hon. Robert Boyle. Redi also, in his ‘Experimenta Naturalia,’ affirms that in experimental philosophy there never was any man so distinguished, and that perhaps there never will be his equal in discovering natural causes.

It is, however, as the father of pneumatic philosophy that his scientific fame is most securely based. To the invention of the air-pump he possesses no claim, an instrument of that sort having been exhibited in 1654 by Otto Guericke of Magdeburg: but his improvements, and his well-combined and ingenious experiments first made that instrument of value, and proved the elasticity of the air. These were given to the world in his first published, and perhaps his most important work, entitled, ‘New Experiments upon the Spring of the Air.’

A considerable portion of Boyle’s works is occupied by religious treatises. Two of these, ‘Seraphic Love,’ and a ‘Free Discourse against Swearing,’ were written before he had reached the age of twenty; though not published for many years after. He established by his will an annual lecture, “in proof of the Christian religion against notorious infidels.” Bentley was the first preacher on this foundation.

Boyle’s funeral sermon was preached by Bishop Burnet, who had been under some obligation to him for assistance in publishing his History of the Reformation. The sermon has been considered one of Burnet’s best; and it has this advantage, that funeral panegyric has seldom been more sincerely and honestly bestowed. We conclude by quoting one or two passages, which illustrate the beauty of Boyle’s private character. “He had brought his mind to such a freedom that he was not apt to be imposed on; and his modesty was such that he did not dictate to others; but proposed his own sense with a due and decent distrust, and was ever very ready to hearken to what was suggested to him by others. When he differed from any, he expressed himself in so humble and obliging a way that he never treated things or persons with neglect, and I never heard that he offended any one person in his whole life by any part of his demeanour. For if at any time he saw cause to speak roundly to any, it was never in passion, or with any reproachful or indecent expressions. And as he was careful to give those who conversed with him no cause or colour for displeasure, he was yet more careful of those who were absent, never to speak ill of any, in which he was the exactest man I ever knew. If the discourse turned to be hard on any, he was presently silent; and if the subject was too long dwelt on, he would at last interpose, and, between reproof and raillery, divert it.

“He was exactly civil, even to ceremony, and though he felt his easiness of access, and the desires of many, all strangers in particular, to be much with him, made great waste of his time; yet, as he was severe in that, not to be denied when he was at home, so he said he knew the heart of a stranger, and how much eased his own had been, while travelling, if admitted to the conversation of those he desired to see; therefore he thought his obligation to strangers was more than bare civility; it was a piece of religious charity in him.

“He had, for almost forty years, laboured under such a feebleness of body, and such lowness of strength and spirits, that it will appear a surprising thing to imagine how it was possible for him to read, to meditate, to try experiments, and write as he did. He bore all his infirmities, and some sharp pains, with the decency and submission that became a Christian and philosopher. He had about him all that unaffected neglect of pomp in clothes, lodging, furniture, and equipage, which agreed with his grave and serious course of life. He was advised to a very ungrateful simplicity of diet, which, by all appearance, was that which preserved him so long beyond all men’s expectation. This he observed so strictly, that in the course of above thirty years he neither ate nor drank to gratify the varieties of appetite, but merely to support nature; and was so regular in it, that he never once transgressed the rule, measure and kind that were prescribed him. * * *

“His knowledge was of so vast an extent, that were it not for the variety of vouchers in their several sort, I should be afraid to say all I know. He carried the study of Hebrew very far into the Rabbinical writings and the other Oriental languages. He had read so much out of the Fathers, that he had formed out of it a clear judgment of all the eminent ones. He had read a vast deal on the Scriptures, and had gone very nicely through the whole controversies on religion, and was a true master of the whole body of divinity. He read the whole compass of the mathematical sciences; and though he did not set himself to spring any new game, yet he knew even the abstrusest parts of geometry. Geography, in the several parts of it that related to navigation or travelling, history, and books of travels, were his diversions. He went very nicely through all the parts of physic; only the tenderness of his nature made him less able to endure the exactness of anatomical dissections, especially of living animals, though he knew them to be most instructive. But for the history of nature, ancient or modern, of the productions of all countries, of the virtues and improvements of plants, of ores and minerals, and all the varieties that are in them in different climates, he was by much, by very much, the readiest and perfectest I ever knew, in the greatest compass, and with the truest exactness. This put him in the way of making that vast variety of experiments, beyond any man, as far as we know, that ever lived. And in these, as he made a great progress in new discoveries, so he used so nice a strictness, and delivered them with so scrupulous a truth, that all who have examined them, may find how safely the world may depend upon them. But his peculiar and favourite study was chemistry, in which he engaged with none of those ravenous and ambitious designs that draw many into them. His design was only to find out Nature, to see into what principles things might be resolved, and of what they were compounded, and to prepare good medicaments for the bodies of men. He spent neither his time nor his fortune upon the vain pursuits of high promises and pretensions. He always kept himself within the compass that his estate might well bear. And as he made chemistry much the better for his dealing with it, so he never made himself either the worse, or the poorer for it.”

It would be easy to multiply testimonies of the high reputation in which Boyle was held: indeed the reader will find numerous instances collected in the article Boyle, in Dr. Kippis’s Biographia Britannica, the perusal of which will amply gratify the reader’s curiosity. Still more detailed accounts of Boyle’s life and character will be found in other works to which we have already referred, especially in Dr. Birch’s Life.

[Illustration: Air-Pump.]

[Illustration:

_Engraved by E. Scriven._

SIR ISAAC NEWTON.

_From the original Picture by Vanderbank in the possession of the Royal Society._

Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.

_London. Published by Charles Knight, Pall Mall East._ ]

[Illustration]

NEWTON

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas-day, 1642 (O. S.), at Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in the parish of Colsterworth, in Lincolnshire. In that spot his family had possessed a small estate for more than a hundred years; and his father died there a few months after his marriage to Harriet Ayscough, and before the birth of his son. The widow soon married again, and removed to North Witham, the rectory of her second husband, Mr. Smith, leaving her son, a weakly child who had not been expected to live through the earliest infancy, under the charge of her mother.

Newton’s education was commenced at the parish school, and at the age of twelve he was sent to Grantham for classical instruction. At first he was idle, but soon rose to the head of the school. The peculiar bent of his mind soon showed itself in his recreations. He was fond of drawing, and sometimes wrote verses; but he chiefly amused himself with mechanical contrivances. Among these was a model of a wind-mill, turned either by the wind, or by a mouse enclosed in it, which he called the miller; a mechanical carriage moved by the person who sat in it; and a water-clock, which was long used in the family of Mr. Clarke, an apothecary, with whom he boarded at Grantham. This was not his only method of measuring time: the house at Woolsthorpe, whither he returned at the age of fifteen, still contains dials made by him during his residence there.

Mr. Smith died in 1656, and his widow then returned to Woolsthorpe with her three children by her second marriage. She brought Newton himself also thither, in the hope that he might be useful in the management of the farm. This expectation was fortunately disappointed. When sent to Grantham on business, he used to leave its execution to the servant who accompanied him, and passed his time in reading, sometimes by the way-side, sometimes at the house of Mr. Clark. His mother no longer opposed the evident tendency of his disposition. He returned to school at Grantham, and was removed thence in his eighteenth year to Trinity College, Cambridge.

The 5th of June, 1660, was the day of his admission as a sizer into that distinguished society. He applied himself eagerly to the study of mathematics, and mastered its difficulties with an ease and rapidity which he was afterwards inclined almost to regret, from an opinion that a closer attention to its elementary parts would have improved the elegance of his own methods of demonstration. In 1664 he became a scholar of his college, and in 1667 was elected to a fellowship, which he retained beyond the regular time of its expiration in 1675, by a special dispensation authorizing him to hold it without taking orders.

It is necessary to return to an earlier date, to trace the series of Newton’s discoveries. This is not the occasion for a minute enumeration of them, or for any elaborate discussion of their value or explanation of their principles; but their history and succession require some notice. The earliest appear to have related to pure mathematics. The study of Dr. Wallis’s works led him to investigate certain properties of series, and this course of research soon conducted him to the celebrated Binomial Theorem. The exact date of his invention of the method of Fluxions is not known; but it was anterior to 1666, when the breaking out of the plague obliged him for a time to quit Cambridge, and consequently when he was only about twenty-three years old.

This change of residence interrupted his optical researches, in which he had already laid the foundation of his great discoveries. He had decomposed light into the coloured rays of which it is compounded, and having thus ascertained the principal cause of the confusion of the images formed by refraction, he had turned his attention to the construction of telescopes which should act by reflection, and be free from this evil. He had not, however, overcome the practical difficulties of his undertaking, when his retreat from Cambridge for a time stopped this train of experiment and invention.

On quitting Cambridge Newton retired to Woolsthorpe, where his mind was principally employed upon the system of the world. The theory of Copernicus and the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler had at length furnished the materials from which the true system was to be deduced. It was indeed all involved in Kepler’s celebrated laws. The equable description of areas proved the existence of a central force; the elliptical form of the planetary orbits, and the relation between their magnitude and the time occupied in describing them, ascertained the law of its variation. But no one had arisen to demonstrate these necessary consequences, or even to conjecture the universal principle from which they were derived. The existence of a central force had been surmised, and the law of its action guessed at; but no proof had been given of either, and little attention had been awakened by the conjecture.

Newton’s discovery appears to have been quite independent of any speculations of his predecessors. The circumstances attending it are well known: the very spot in which it first dawned upon him is ascertained. He was sitting in the garden at Woolsthorpe, when the fall of an apple called his attention to the force which caused its descent, to the probable limits of its action and law of its operation. Its power was not sensibly diminished at any distance at which experiments had been made: might it not then extend to the moon and guide that luminary in her orbit? It was certain that her motion was regulated in the same manner as that of the planets round the sun: if, therefore, the law of the sun’s action could be ascertained, that by which the earth acted would also be found by analogy. Newton, therefore, proceeded to ascertain by calculation from the known elements of the planetary orbits, the law of the sun’s action. The great experiment remained: the trial whether the moon’s motions showed the force acting upon her to correspond with the theoretical amount of terrestrial gravity at her distance. The result was disappointment. The trial was to be made by ascertaining the exact space by which the earth’s action turned the moon aside from her course in a given time. This depended on her actual distance from the earth, which was only known by comparison with the earth’s diameter. The received estimate of that quantity was very erroneous; it proceeded on the supposition that a degree of latitude was only sixty English miles, nearly a seventh part less than its actual length. The calculation of the moon’s distance and of the space described by her, gave results involved in the same proportion of error; and thus the space actually described appeared to be a seventh part less than that which corresponded to the theory. It was not Newton’s habit to force the results of experiments into conformity with hypothesis. He could not, indeed, abandon his leading idea, which rested, in the case of the planetary motions, on something very nearly amounting to demonstration. But it seemed that some modification was required before it could be applied to the moon’s motion, and no satisfactory solution of the difficulty occurred. The scheme therefore was incomplete, and, in conformity with his constant habit of producing nothing till it was fully matured, Newton kept it undivulged for many years.

On his return to Cambridge Newton again applied himself to the construction of reflecting telescopes, and succeeded in effecting it in 1668. In the following year Dr. Barrow resigned in his favour the Lucasian professorship of mathematics, which Newton continued to hold till the year 1703, when Whiston, who had been his deputy from 1699, succeeded him in the chair. On January 11, 1672, Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was then best known by the invention of the reflecting telescope; but immediately on his election he communicated to the Society the particulars of his theory of light, on which he had already delivered three courses of lectures at Cambridge, and they were shortly afterwards published in the Philosophical Transactions.

It is impossible here to state the various phenomena of light and colours which were first detected and explained by Newton. They entirely changed the science of optics, and every advance which has since been made in it has only added to the importance and confirmed the value of his observations. The success of the new theory was complete. Newton, however, was much vexed and harassed by the discussions which it occasioned. The annoyance which he thus experienced made him even think of abandoning the pursuit of science, and although it failed to withdraw him from the studies to which he was devoted, it confirmed him in his unwillingness to publish their results.