OXFORD: A LEARNED JUNTO
“... I see no cause to despair that, whether or no my writings
be protected, the truths they hold forth will in time, in spite
of opposition, establish themselves in the minds of men, as the
circulation of the blood, and other, formerly much contested,
truths have already done. My humour has naturally made me
too careful not to offend those I dissent from, to make it
necessary for any man to be my adversary upon the account of
personal injuries or provocations. And as for any whom either
judgment or envy may invite to contend, that the things I have
communicated to the world deserved not so much applause as they
have had the luck to be entertained with; that shall make no
quarrel betwixt us: for perhaps I am myself as much of that
mind as he; and however I shall not scruple to profess myself
one of those who is more desirous to spend his time usefully,
than to have the glory of leaving nothing that was ever written
against himself unanswered; and who is more solicitous to
pursue the ways of discovering truth than to have it thought
that he never was so much subject to human frailties as to
miss it.”—ROBERT BOYLE: Preface to _A Defence of the Doctrine
touching the Spring and Weight of the Air_.
Several of the original Philosophical Society had migrated to Oxford
before Robert Boyle joined them there. Dr. Wilkins had been appointed
Warden of Wadham at the _Visitation and Purgation_ of the University in
1648; Dr. Wallis, at the same time, had been made Savilian Professor of
Geometry; and Dr. Goddard, of Wood Street celebrity, had become Warden
of Merton. Robert Boyle does not seem to have been in Oxford during the
_Encænia_ in July 1654. There is, at least, no mention of him in Evelyn’s
description of “the civilities of Oxford” during that happy week; and
the friendship between Boyle and Evelyn, that was to last “neare fourty
yeares,” was not to begin till a little later. But Evelyn has described
Oxford society exactly as it was when Robert Boyle entered it.
Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn arrived in Oxford “on the eve of the Act,”[188] and
next day, after midday dinner, “the Proctor opened the Act at St. Marie’s
(according to custome) and the Prevaricators their drollery. Then the
Doctors disputed. We supp’d at Wadham College.” On Sunday, Dr. French,
Canon of Christ Church, the preacher at St. Mary’s, had his little fling
at the Philosophers. “True wisdom,” he said, “was not to be had in the
books of the Philosophers, but in the Scriptures alone.” He based his
observations on a text from St. Matthew xii. 42: “And, behold, a greater
than Solomon is here.” On Sunday afternoon the famous Independent, Dr.
Owen, now “Cromwell’s Vice-Chancellor,” preached a wonderful sermon,
“perstringing Episcopacy”—a sermon that Evelyn and some others present
must have found particularly trying to listen to. They dined that day
with Dr. Seth Ward, who had been one of the “Prevaricators” himself, when
he was at Cambridge, and was so alarmingly witty on the occasion that
he nearly lost his degree. And at night they supped in Balliol College
Hall—Evelyn’s own college.
On Monday they sat through the whole Act in St. Mary’s;[189]—the long
speeches of the Proctors, Vice-Chancellors and Professors, and the
creation of Doctors “by the cap, ring, kisse,” etc. The Inceptor[190]
made a most excellent oration, “abating his Presbyterian animosities
which he could not withhold.” And after all this paraphernalia “there
were but 4 in Theologie and 3 in Medicine,” which was thought not bad,
“the times considered.” And again there was a magnificent supper with
Evelyn’s “dear and excellent friend,” Dr. Wilkins of Wadham.
Happy days, two hundred and sixty years ago! There was music at All
Souls, “voices and theorbos,” performed by “ingenious scholars.” And Dr.
Barlow, the learned Librarian,[191] took them over the Bodleian, and
showed them all the treasures, including the 800-years-old manuscript
of the Venerable Bede. The Divinity School vied with the Physical and
Anatomical School in entertaining the visitors; and, at St. John’s,
the Library was almost eclipsed by poor Laud’s gift of mathematical
instruments, and by “2 skeletons, finely cleaned and put together.” New
College Chapel, much to Evelyn’s satisfaction, was still _in statu quo_,
“notwithstanding the scrupulosities of the times”; and at Christ Church
they saw the “Office of Henry VIII,” the gift of Cardinal Wolsey, with
its wonderful miniatures and gilding, and the famous painted windows
of the Cathedral, now “much abused.” In Magdalen Chapel, everything
was in its “pontificall order,” except that the Altar had been “turn’d
table-wise;” and there the famous musician, Mr. Gibbon, kindly played to
them upon the double organ. The Physick garden was visited, “where the
sensitive plant was shewed us for a greate wonder.” Canes, olives and
rhubarb grew there, “but no extraordinary curiosities, besides very good
fruit, which, when the ladys had tasted, we return’d in our coach to our
lodgings.”
And the _Encænia_ festivities wound up with midday dinner at Wadham. “We
all din’d at that most obliging and universally-curious Dr. Wilkins’s
at Wadham College.” There, after dinner, they were shown the Warden’s
new transparent beehives, from which the honey could be drawn without
destroying the bees, and Evelyn was presented with an empty hive to
carry back with him to his own garden at Deptford. Mr. Christopher Wren,
that “prodigious young scholar,” that “miracle of a youth,” was of the
company; and everybody wandered at will among Dr. Wilkins’s scientific
and mechanical curiosities, conic sections, magnets, thermometers,
“way-wisers,”[192] and all the rest, in the upper rooms and gallery of
the Warden’s lodging.
The Warden, it may be observed, was still a bachelor: it was not till two
years later that he married Cromwell’s sister. At the time of Mr. and
Mrs. Evelyn’s visit to Oxford, that lady was still Mrs. French, wife of
the worthy Canon of Christ Church, who had preached on the text, “Behold,
a greater than Solomon is here!”
This, then, was the Oxford of 1654 that was to welcome Robert Boyle. He
had evidently been there, looking about him, during his flying visit from
Ireland in 1653; and Lady Ranelagh—an experimentalist too in her own
way—had gone to Oxford afterwards to inspect the lodgings selected by her
brother.[193]
“MY BROTHER,
“It has pleased God to bring us safe to Oxford, and I am lodged
at Mr. Crosse’s, with design to be able to give you from
experience an account which is the warmer room; and indeed I am
satisfied with neither of them, as to that point, because the
doors are placed so just by the chimnies, that if you have the
benefit of the fire you must venture having the inconvenience
of the wind, which yet may be helped in either by a folding
skreen; and then I think that which looks into the garden
will be the more comfortable, though he have near hanged, and
intends to matt, that you lay in before. You are here much
desired, and I could wish you here as soon as you can: for I
think you would have both more liberty and more conversation
than where you are, and both these will be necessary, both for
your health and usefulness.”
Mr. Crosse was an apothecary, and his house was in the High Street,
adjoining University College. He seems to have been recommended to Boyle
as a convenient landlord, not only on account of Boyle’s own fickle
health, but as one who might be useful to him in laboratory work. He was
a staunch Churchman, and a particular friend of John Fell, the son of
the famous old Royalist Dean of Christ Church, who had been ejected at
the Visitation of 1648. Many scenes have been enacted in Christ Church
quadrangle, but none more melodramatic than the ejection of Mrs. Fell
and her family after the Dean himself had been carried off in custody to
London. Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn must have shaken their heads indeed if they
were shown the identical spot in the Quad where Mrs. Fell and her lady
friends had been deposited, having chosen to be forcibly carried out,
rather than voluntarily walk out, of the Deanery. John Fell, the son,
a student of Christ Church, had been ejected too, but he lived on in
Oxford; and one of his sisters married Dr. Willis, the physician, who set
up in practice in a house in Merton Street, opposite to Merton College.
In a room in this house, thanks to John Fell and his brother-in-law Dr.
Willis, with one or two more strong Churchmen, the Services of the Church
were to be privately maintained through all the years of the Commonwealth.
Did Robert Boyle, Geneva-bred, make one of the little semi-forbidden
congregation of men and women that gathered in Dr. Willis’s house for
service and Communion? It is doubtful. Boyle’s own letter to John Durie,
written in 1647, speaks his mind on denominational differences.[194]
“It has long been,” he says, “as well my wonder as my grief, to see such
comparatively petty differences in judgement make such wide breaches and
vast divisions in affection. It is strange that men should rather be
quarrelling for a few trifling opinions, wherein they dissent, than to
embrace one another for those many fundamental truths wherein they agree.
For my own part, in some two or three and forty months that I spent in
the very town of Geneva, as I never found that people discontented with
their own Church government (the gallingness of whose yoke is the grand
scarecrow that frights us here) so could I never observe in it any such
transcendent excellency as could oblige me either to bolt Heaven against,
or open Newgate for, all those that believe they may be saved under
another....”
Evelyn, who knew Robert Boyle intimately for nearly forty years, was of
opinion that he “held the same free thoughts,” in matters of religion
and religious discipline, “which he had of Philosophy.” He practised
Christianity “without noise, dispute, or determining.” He owned no master
in religion but the Divine Author of it; and, what is more, he owned “no
religion but primitive, no rule but Scripture, no law but right reason;
for the rest allways conformable to the present settlement, without any
sort of singularity.”[195]
Only once is Robert Boyle known to have been persuaded to enter a
conventicle. Curiosity led him, on one occasion, to Sir Henry Vane’s
house, to hear the great man preach “in a large thronged room a long
sermon.”[196] The text was from Daniel xii. 2: “And many of them that
sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and
some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Looking, from a modern point of
view, to the possibilities of such a text on the Resurrection, it is a
little disappointing to learn that Mr. Boyle stood up at the end of Sir
Henry Vane’s discourse and submitted, in his gentlest Oxford manner, that
the preacher had suffered the meaning to “_evaporate_ into Allegory.” Sir
Henry Vane was at this time at the very height of his authority in the
State; and Robert Boyle, telling the story to Sir Peter Pett, explained
that Sir Henry’s congregation that day was composed of “dependants
on him, and expectants from him,” who would never have dreamed of
questioning his interpretations of Scripture, whatsoever they might have
been. “But I,” said Boyle, “having no little awes of that kind upon me,
thought myself bound to enter the lists with him as I did, that the sense
of the Scriptures might not be depraved.”
According to Birch, Sir Henry Vane had the last word. He had recognised
in his critic the celebrated Mr. Robert Boyle; and when Mr. Boyle sat
down, Sir Henry assured him and the rest of his audience that he had
only intended his remarks on the words of Daniel to be in the way of
_occasional reflections_.[197]
But there was another little congregation, which met in an upper
room in Oxford; a room in the house of the obliging and universally
curious Dr. Wilkins of Wadham. This was the weekly meeting of the
Invisibles; the “learned Junto,” as Evelyn has dubbed them; a society
which may be described as non-militant and non-party, and was
certainly non-sectarian—the Oxford branch of the original Invisible
or Philosophical College, begun in London in 1645, before Wilkins and
Wallis and Goddard removed to Oxford. The Oxford branch kept up a regular
correspondence with the London Society; and after a time, when Wilkins
forsook Oxford for Cambridge, the weekly meetings of the Invisibles were
transferred from Wadham to Robert Boyle’s own rooms.
And what a brilliant little “learned Junto” it was, in spite of the
scrupulosities of the times! There was Wilkins himself, an Oxford man
by birth, son of the Oxford goldsmith with the “very mechanicall hands”
and a head that “ran much on perpetuall motion.” Wilkins was a man of
about forty, “lustie, strong-groune, well-sett and broad-shouldered.” His
manners were courteous, as became a man who had been Chaplain to Charles
I’s nephew, the Prince Palatine, elder brother of Prince Rupert. A
Parliament-man himself, Wilkins had taken the Covenant and the Wardenship
of Wadham, and his Theological Degree. Under his tolerant rule, Wadham
was flourishing, still patronised by some of the great “Malignant”
families of England: Dr. Wilkins’s cheerful tolerance was greasing all
wheels. And meanwhile the Warden himself was the life and spirit of the
New Philosophy at Oxford—known, not only for his universal curiosity and
irresistible manners, but as a writer of books. Had he not, as early as
1638, when still quite a young man, attempted to prove that the Moon
might be a habitable world? And had he not, to a third edition, added the
bold hypothesis, that the Moon might one day be reached “by volitation”?
And in 1640 he had propounded in print the probability that this Earth
itself was a planet. Clearly, the Warden was before his time; and many
things besides the consciences of young cavalier-manhood were safe in his
keeping.
And then there was Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, since 1649 Savilian
Professor of Geometry. Wallis was about thirty-eight; a man of “moderate
principles,” robust and energetic, with a serene temper that was “not
easily ruffled,” but all the same a man who could hit out from the
shoulder when he wanted to; as he did when he carried on his famous
controversy with Dr. Hobbes. Wallis, as a believer in the New Philosophy,
was to be among the first men to “maintain the circulation of the
blood.” But the particular feat which had made Wallis’s fortune, some
years before he went to Oxford, was a feat in “cryptologie.” In December
1642 he was private chaplain to a great family in London; and one
evening at supper a cypher letter had arrived, which brought important
political news. The Chaplain, in two hours, succeeded in deciphering
it; and after that he seems to have become “cryptologist-in-chief” to
the Parliamentarian Army: he is said to have had the deciphering of the
King’s private correspondence taken at the battle of Naseby. He held
successive City livings, was Secretary to the Westminster Assembly, and
one of the founders of the Invisible Society. And in 1649—a married man,
then—he went to Oxford as Savilian Professor of Geometry and one of the
most vigorous of the “learned Junto.”
Dr. Goddard of Wood Street was another of them. He was a Deptford man,
son of a ship-builder; in 1654 a man of about thirty-seven. He had been
a student at Oxford, but had left it to study medicine abroad; and on
his return he had taken his medical degrees at Cambridge. Since 1646
he had been in London, a Fellow of the College of Physicians, living
in Wood Street, where he entertained the Invisibles and manufactured
his _arcana_—the famous “Goddard’s drops” among them—in his own private
laboratory. As Cromwell’s physician, he had been with Cromwell in
the Irish and Scottish campaigns and in Cromwell’s severe illness in
Edinburgh; and on his return with him to London, after the battle of
Worcester, he had been appointed Warden of Merton.
And living just opposite to Merton College was the Oxford-bred Willis,
with his strong royalist and episcopal sympathies, son-in-law of the
stubborn old Dean of Christ Church and the lady who had been deposited
in the quadrangle. Willis was a greater man in his own profession than
the inventor of “Goddard’s drops.” A firm believer in the New Philosophy,
he was to dissect many brains: a little bit of our cerebral geography
is still known as the “Circle of Willis.” He is the man who discovered
_diabetes mellitus_, and he may be called our first specialist in
diseases of the nervous system.
These, with the “miracle of a youth” Christopher Wren, then Fellow of
All Souls, and Seth Ward, the dangerously witty Savilian Professor
of Astronomy, who lodged in the chamber over the gateway of Wadham,
formed the “learned Junto” that welcomed Robert Boyle to Oxford. But
the Librarian of the Bodleian, Dr. Barlow,[198] must not be forgotten,
though he was not an Invisible, and not at all in favour of the New
Philosophy. Boyle, like many men of his time, was a student of divinity
as well as of science; and he had come to Oxford partly, perhaps, on
account of the Orientalists there. For he was studying Hebrew, Greek,
Chaldee and Syriac, so as to be able to read the Scriptures for himself.
He had learnt by himself, he says, “as much Greek and Hebrew as sufficed
to read the Old and New Testaments,” merely that he might do so in the
Hebrew and Greek, and thereby free himself from the necessity of relying
on a translation. And “a Chaldee grammar I likewise took the pains of
learning, to be able to understand that part of Daniel, and those few
other portions of Scripture that were written in that tongue; and I have
added a Syriac grammar purely to be able one day to read the divine
discourses of our Saviour in His own language.” And he quotes the “known
saying”—
“Though we stream waters not unpleasant think,
Yet with more gusto of the Spring we drink.”[199]
Accordingly the Orientalists in Oxford—men like Pococke, Hyde and
Clarke—were to be among his new friends; but perhaps the most intimate
of all was Dr. Barlow of the Bodleian. Barlow, logician and casuist, the
man who saw both sides—to our modern ideas a bit of a trimmer—was yet “a
man of prodigious learning and proportionall memory.” He knew exactly
“what the fathers, schoolmen and casuists had said upon any question of
divinity or case of conscience”;[200] and with all his accomplishments,
and in spite of his limitations, he was a delightful companion—“very
communicative of his knowledge”—and Robert Boyle liked him.
One other man there was, a mere boy in 1654, but in a way, perhaps, the
most notable of them all: a little deformed man, with a pale, sharp,
clever face, and lank dark hair that hung about his eyes; a man with a
stooping figure and a quick step; a queer little solitary man who ate
little and slept less, and worked restlessly and incessantly; a man,
even in those young days, of a melancholy, jealous temper, warped by
ill-health. This was Robert Hooke, who had come to Oxford in 1653, when
he was eighteen, as servitor or chorister of Christ Church. He was the
sickly, gifted son of a country parson,[201] and, too delicate to learn
lessons, had used his little brain and fingers to make toy-ships that
would sail, toy-guns that would go off, and toy-clocks that would go
on. Then, for a time, he was with Dr. Busby at Westminster School; and
at Christ Church his restless genius brought him to the notice of the
Invisibles. Dr. Wilkins, with his pet dream of an excursion to the Moon,
must have been pleased to find a young man who could work out “thirty
ways of flying.” With Seth Ward’s help, Hooke studied mathematics and
astronomy; and he worked for Willis in Willis’s own laboratory. It was
Willis who recommended him to Boyle; and when Boyle set up a laboratory
at Oxford, Hooke became Boyle’s personal assistant. “Boyle’s Law”[202]
and “Hooke’s Law”[203] go together in the Handbooks of Physical Science.
The air-pump, the _Machina Boyleana_, invented for his own purposes by
Robert Boyle, was “perfected” for him by Hooke. “Mr. Hooke,” wrote Boyle
in the Introduction to his _Spring of the Air_,[204] “was with me when I
had these things under consideration.” The years spent working for and
with Robert Boyle were perhaps the happiest in Hooke’s life. His chatty
letters to Boyle, after the two parted company and Hooke became Curator
of the Royal Society, show real affection and trust. They begin “Ever
honoured Sir,” and end “Your Honour’s most affectionate, most faithful,
and most humble Servant.”
But these things were not the work of a day or a year. The air-pump was
only the beginning, to enable its inventor to make a “just theory of
the air.” By this he “demonstrated its elasticity” and “that property
alone was a means to find out abundance more.”[205] Boyle’s first
publication, _New Experiments, physico-mechanical, touching the Spring
of the Air and its Effects, made for the most part in a new Pneumatical
Engine_, was printed at Oxford, 1660.[206] The dedicatory letter to his
nephew, the young Lord Dungarvan, is dated from Beaconsfield, December
20, 1659—where, in all probability, Boyle was spending Christmas with
his friend Edmund Waller, the Poet, at his house, Hall Barn. The book
was attacked by Franciscus Linus and by Hobbes; and Boyle answered his
“objectors” in the _Defence of the Doctrine touching the Spring and
Weight of the Air_, published 1662, answering more especially Franciscus
Linus, as Dr. Wallis had taken Hobbes in hand.
Do people who are not scientifically employed ever realise the absorbing,
baffling, fascinating work that goes on inside a chemical or a physical
laboratory? The “painful patience in delays,” the “faithfulness in little
things,” the flash of success, the hard wall of “negative result”? Who
but the “Scepticall Chymist” himself understands the Spirit of his
Research?
“But it is scarce one day (or hour in the day) or night,” wrote Hartlib
to Boyle, in 1659, “but my soul is crying out—
“‘Phosphore! redde diem; quid gaudia nostra moraris.
Phosphore! redde diem!’”[207]
It was in this spirit that Robert Boyle worked in his Oxford laboratory,
through the years of the Protectorate and on to the coming of Charles
II. Slowly and laboriously, and very gently, careful not to offend those
from whom he dissented, he amassed and examined evidences that were to
break down the old mistaken notions of the Greek and mediæval philosophy,
and to build up—a very little way, perhaps, but on a new and sure
foundation—the mighty structure of physical and chemical science. Its
golden keys were to be handed over to Isaac Newton and Dalton, and a long
and brilliant line of workers in experimental science. What if Robert
Boyle, in the seventeenth century, spoke of phosphorus as “nocte-luca”
and of gaseous elasticity as “spring of the air?” Dr. Wilkins, of Wadham,
was only then preparing his treatise on a _Real Character_.[208] As
early as 1647, Boyle himself, then only twenty, wrote to Hartlib: “If
the design of the _Real Character_ take effect, it will in good part
make amends to mankind for what their pride lost them at the tower of
Babel.”[209] But even Dr. Wilkins’s _Real Character_ would scarcely
have been the vocabulary of to-day. Boyle’s Law, in whatever words he
expressed it, remains incontrovertible.[210] What if he just missed the
discovery of Hydrogen after actually collecting it in a receiver? The
oversights of science are the inevitable dear companions of research.
What if, after giving to science the definition of an element, as
distinguished from a mixture or compound, he could not go further, with
the means then at hand, by suggesting any one substance as elementary?
None the less, he had realised and stated a great natural fact, founding
thereby a new era in science. The “Elements” of the Ancients, that had
terrified him in childhood, were to be broken up; their secrets were to
be extorted from them, for the good of mankind. There is an echo of the
old Genevan thunderstorm, and the older _Benedicite_, in Boerhaave’s
eulogium of Boyle—“to him we owe the secrets of fire, air, water,
animals, vegetables and frosts”; but in modern times, and in modern
terms, Robert Boyle has had his recognition—
“In the days of the early Greeks, the word ‘element’ was applied rather
to denote a property of matter than one of its constituents. Thus, when
a substance was said to contain fire, air, water, and earth (of which
terms a childish game, doubtless once played by all of us, is a relic),
it probably meant that they partook of the nature of the so-called
elements. Inflammability showed the presence of concealed fire; the
escape of ‘airs’ when some substances are heated or when vegetable or
animal matter is distilled, no doubt led to the idea that these airs
were imprisoned in the matters from which they escaped; and hardness and
permanence were ascribed to the presence of earth, while liquidity and
fusibility were properties conveyed by the presence of concealed water.
At a later date the ‘Spagyrics’ added three ‘hypostatical principles’ to
the quadrilateral; these were ‘salt,’ ‘sulphur,’ and ‘mercury.’ The first
conveyed solubility, and fixedness in fire; the second, inflammability,
and the third, the power which some substances manifest of producing
a liquid, generally termed ‘phlegm,’ on application of heat, or of
themselves being converted into the liquid state by fusion.
“It was Robert Boyle, in his _Skeptical Chymist_, who first controverted
these ancient and medieval notions, and who gave to the word ‘element’
the meaning that it now possesses—the constituent of a compound.”[211]
So the truths that Robert Boyle’s writings held forth have, in spite of
opposition, established themselves, as he himself believed they would
establish themselves, in the minds of men.