It was during the lifetime of Robert Boyle that our forefathers began to
come into close contact with the races and nationalities of the outer
world. When he was born in County Cork in the year 1627, small and
isolated bands of Englishmen were elbowing Red Indians from the eastern
sea-board of North America; before his death in London in 1691, at the
age of sixty-four, he had seen these pioneer bands become united into a
British fringe stretching almost without a break from Newfoundland to
Florida. Neither he nor any one else in England could then have guessed
that in less than two centuries the narrow fringe of colonists would
have spread from shore to shore, thus carpeting a continent with a new
people. It was in his time, too, that English merchants and sailors made
a closer acquaintance with the peoples of India, of the Far East, and
with the sea-board natives of Africa and of South America. We have only
to turn to the six splendid volumes in which his experiments,
observations, and writings are preserved to see how he viewed the world
which his countrymen were opening up beneath his eyes. In a short paper,
drafted some time before his death, he gives the most minute directions
to guide navigators in drawing up reports of newly discovered lands. His
directions relate to every conceivable property or aspect of a new
country--its geography, mineral wealth, natural products, climate--all
but its inhabitants. Like many Englishmen of his time, Boyle conceived
that his duty by native peoples began and ended when he had seen that
they were supplied with copies of the Bible. For him, and for most of
his contemporaries, there seem to have been no racial problems; for they
did not regard the meeting and mingling of diverse races or of peoples
of different nationalities as matters which deserved investigation and
explanation. Boyle witnessed the acutest phases of the 'plantation' of
Ireland, but the inquiries he set on foot regarding that country were:
'How it cometh to pass that there are not frogs, toads, snakes, moles,
nightingales, rarely magpies' within its borders; he inquired, too,
concerning the true nature of 'diverse things which the Irish foolishly
report of St. Patrick'--especially concerning the 'birds turned into
stones for chirping when St. Patrick was preaching'. There were, of
course, racial and national problems in Boyle's time, but they had not
then presented themselves before the tribunal of the public mind as
matters demanding investigation and treatment.