ignored, and solving them, for the most part, after a fashion which Bacon would have repudiated, carried out, nevertheless, to their extreme conclusions doctrines in some degree countenanced by his great name. To the second class belonged Boyle, Hooke, Wren, and the other early members of the Royal Society. These men inherited the labours and the spirit of those who had worked while Bacon taught of Harriot, Gilbert, Napier, and Harvey; but they were born while the air still vibrated to the mighty words of Verulam. They then enrolled themselves under the banner which he had unfurled, and silently followed the examples which he had condemned. They identified him with a system which he had disowned, and with acclamation proclaimed him leader of a movement which he had emphatically declared to be unfruitful. While professing to follow where he led, they in truth carried his authority captive with them along the paths they themselves chose. This, indeed, was the result, not of insubordination, but of necessity. They were compelled to seek a modus vivendi between the conflicting claims of Nature and her interpreter, and they found the conciliation that they sought not very far from the modest courses of their predecessors.

It is not too much to say that what was distinctive in Bacon's system was impracticable, and that what was practicable was already common property. The essential novelty on which he relied for the infallibility of his mode of interrogating nature was his method of exclusions. But this ingenious invention implied an impossible preliminary, and rested on a monstrous assumption. The preliminary to its successful operation was the compilation of what he called a Natural History;' that is, an exhaustive catalogue of all natural phenomena, constituting a vast repository of materials for induction. Until this should be accomplished, he laid down dogmatically that no progress worthy the human race was possible,* and declared the history without the method to be infinitely more serviceable to science than the method without the history. The assumption was that the infinite complexity of visible and sensible objects are formed by the varying combinations of a limited number of simple natures' (such as heat, weight, colour, &c.), just as words and sentences in endless diversity are compounded out of a few elementary signs. And as, by learning six-andtwenty letters, we get at the secret of written language, so we

Works, vol. i. p. 394. Spedding's ed.

† Ibid. vol. ii. p. 16.

Nov. Org. lib. i. p. 121.

have only to construct a complete alphabet of Nature, in order to read her riddles with ease and certainty. Thus, the second step in the process was nothing less than to frame a synopsis of all the modes of action in the universe.* The peculiar efficacy of the Exclusiva' now becomes apparent. All natures' save one, being excluded, by a series of skilful experiments, from causal connection with the phenomenon under investigation, the residual element is negatively, but conclusively, proved to be the true cause or 'form'

sought for.

It was from this special invention, and not from the general application of inductive rules, that Bacon's Organ' derived its peculiar efficacy. This was the new art of discovery likened by him to a pair of compasses, armed with which the least skilful hand might be guided to define a perfect circle. This was the universal nostrum-the elixir vitæ of sciencewhich had the one drawback common to all methods professing to transcend nature; that its operation was clogged with an impossible condition. It is easy enough for us, from our present point of view, to see that the method of exclusions was tainted with a logical vice. It implied a petitio principii; it presupposed, while promising to impart, universal knowledge. It was not so easy-it was perhaps impossible for Bacon, for his contemporaries, and even for his immediate successors, to see this. They did not in fact perceive any impossibility in a scheme for tabulating the universe. On the contrary, they looked forward confidently to the time when it should be accomplished. The preparation of a universal History of Nature was a purpose always present to the minds of the founders of the Royal Society, and some preliminary steps towards its execution were even attempted by them. Bishop Spratt has left on record the queries and directions, what things are needful to be observed,' composed with this view. Some of these enquiries sound, to our instructed ears, rather comical. We take the following specimens:

'Whether diamonds and other precious stones grow again after three or four years, in the same places where they have been digged out? 'Whether there be a fountain in Sumatra which runneth pure balsam? 'Whether in the Island of Sambrero there be found a vegetable with a worm for its root, diminishing more and more, according as the tree groweth in greatness?

*The sixth division of the Second Book of the Novum Organum was to have been entitled ' De synopsi omnium naturarum in universo; but this part of the work was never executed.

+ The History of the Royal Society of London, 1667, p. 158.

'What ground there may be for that relation concerning horns taking root and growing about Goa?

'Whether there be a tree in Mexico that yields water, wine, vinegar, oyl, milk, honey, wax, thread, and needles?'

The answer to this last query, furnished to them by one of their merchants of light,' was, that the Cokos Tree yields all this and more.'

The disproportionate importance attached to this species of information by the revivers of science is curiously illustrated by the fact, that the funds of the Royal Society having been exhausted in printing Willughby's History of Fishes,' they were obliged to decline undertaking the publication of Newton's Principia.' Indeed one of their most ingenious members was as fully convinced as Bacon had been, that the true highway to that knowledge which is power lay in this direction. Of this remarkable person it is now time to give some

account.

Robert Hooke was born at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, July 18, 1635. Like Newton, he was a sickly child, and like Newton too, his early years were distinguished and diverted by his singular mechanical ingenuity. He has left it on record that, having seen an old brass clock taken to pieces, he succeeded in constructing, in imitation of it, a wooden one that would, after a fashion, go; and about the same period, he rigged out a miniature ship with ropes, pulleys, and masts, besides a contrivance to make it fire off some small guns while sailing across an adjacent haven; with what childish applause and self-gratulation, we are left to imagine. Nor did his sole gifts lie in this direction. His literary aptitude was beyond the common, and he showed a marked taste for music and painting. His education was as various as his talents. His father, who was minister of the parish, destined him for his own profession; but his infirm health precluded serious study, and it was consequently proposed to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, or some similarly skilled artisan. After his father's death in 1648, his artistic tendencies so far got the upper hand, that we hear of him in the workshop of Sir Peter Lely, where, however, his occupation seems to have been nothing more æsthetic than colour-grinding. Either this preliminary stage of art disgusted him, or (as his biographers prefer to state) the smell of oil-paint aggravated his constitutional headaches, and he was transferred to the care of Dr. Busby, the celebrated master of Westminster School, who kept him gratuitously in his own house for several years. Here his education, properly speaking, may be said to have begun. He not only acquired a

competent knowledge of Latin and Greek, with a tincture of Hebrew and other Oriental languages, but is said to have astonished his teachers by mastering the first six books of Euclid in as many days, and by playing, without instruction, twenty lessons on the organ. In 1653 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, as servitor to a Mr. Goodman; and ten years later received, on the nomination of Lord Clarendon, then Chancellor of the University, the degree of Master of Arts, which his poverty had perhaps prevented him from taking in the ordinary

course.

In 1654, the Hon. Robert Boyle, having finished his travels in Italy and his studies at Leyden, came to reside at Oxford. This amiable and ingenious gentleman has been quaintly panegyrised by an Irish humourist as the father of chemistry and brother of the Earl of Cork.' Although the clauses of this eulogy command different degrees of assent, and claim different kinds of esteem, they may be taken together as roughly summarising the merits of its subject in the popular apprehension of that time. He was infected to an extraordinary extent with the prevailing experimental fervour, and contributed perhaps more than any of his contemporaries to advance the credit and promote the cultivation of science. The tinge of credulity which occasionally coloured his enquiries may be excused (in the words of Bacon's apology for corruption) as vitium temporis non hominis, and we suppress a smile at his solemn testamentary disposition of an infallible recipe for multiplying gold,' when we find Newton and Locke the eager recipients of the secret.

*

Several members of the Philosophical or Invisible College' of London finding themselves about this time together at Oxford, their discussions were resumed, and Hooke's singular mechanical skill quickly brought him to their notice. Boyle at once attached him to himself, and, if we are to believe what Antony Wood tells us, was glad to improve his foreign acquirements by receiving from the young servitor instruction in Euclid, and some much-needed light on the Cartesian philosophy. What is more certain is, that Hooke constructed for him an air-pump vastly superior in design to that recently contrived at Magdeburg by Otto Guericke, and differing in no essential particular from that now in use. He further devised thirty different modes of flying, and emulated Archytas in the production of a' Module' (we quote his own words), which, by the help of springs and wings, raised and sustained itself in the p. 628.

* Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. iv.

'air; but finding,' he adds, ' by my own trials, and afterwards by calculation, that the muscles of a man's body were not 'sufficient to do anything considerable of that kind, I applied my mind to contrive a way to make artificial muscles, divers designs whereof I shewed also at the same time to Dr. Wil'kins, then Warden of Wadham College, but was in many of 'my trials frustrated of my expectations.'*

6

It may be conjectured that the failure of these attempts sufficed to convince the Icarus of Wadham of the impracticability of his projected lunar excursion, as well as to divert their author to less ambitious designs. The improvement of timepieces was then looked upon as the shortest road to the solution of the great practical problem of finding the longitude at sea, and in this direction, accordingly, Hooke next turned his thoughts and his experiments. He was rewarded by the discovery of a contrivance for applying springs to regulate the movement of watches. For this important invention his friends endeavoured to procure him a patent, which he, however, refused, being dissatisfied with the terms proposed; and it thus remained undivulged, and by many disbelieved in. But when, in 1675, Huyghens published, in the Journal des Savants,' his discovery of spiral watch-springs, Hooke indignantly claimed it as his own, incidentally attacking Oldenburg, then Secretary of the Royal Society, with whom he was never on very civil terms. A sharp paper-conflict ensued, Hooke (quite unjustifiably) accusing Oldenburg of trafficking in intelligence,' and Oldenburg retaliating with the better-founded assertion that Hooke's pendulum-watches' could never be got to go; while Huyghens, who might well disdain to wrangle over so small a prize, stood aloof, and let the controversy rage. Hooke's priority, as regards the principle, is unquestionable; but it is equally unquestionable that the modification introduced by Huyghens first brought the improved timepieces into general use. That modification was nothing more than the coiling into a spiral of a spring which, in Hooke's design, had remained straight. So fine is the line drawn between failure and success.

The history of this invention is, in brief, the history of Hooke's life. He was a man whose brilliant qualities were neutralised one by the other. His extraordinary ingenuity was marred by his equally extraordinary versatility. His thoughts pursued each other in a rapid succession of vivid and original suggestions; but they found no halting-place on the

*The Life of Dr. Robert Hooke, 'Posthumous Works,' p. iv. VOL. CLII. NO. CCCXI.

C