After the death of Bacon, one of the most distinguished Englishmen
was certainly Robert Boyle, who, if compared with his contemporaries,
may be said to rank immediately below Newton, though of course very
inferior to him as an original thinker. Boyle was the first who
instituted exact experiments into the relation between colour and heat;
and by this means not only ascertained some very important facts, but
laid a foundation for that union between optics and thermotics, which,
though not yet completed, now merely waits for some great philosopher
to strike out a generalisation large enough to cover both, and thus
fuse the two sciences into a single study. It is also to Boyle, more
than to any other Englishman, that we owe the science of hydrostatics
in the state in which we now possess it.[3] He is also the original
discoverer of that beautiful law, so fertile in valuable results,
according to which the elasticity of air varies as its density. And,
in the opinion of one of the most eminent modern naturalists, it was
Boyle who opened up those chemical inquiries which went on accumulating
until, a century later, they supplied the means by which Lavoisier and
his contemporaries fixed the real basis of chemistry, and enabled it
for the first time to take its proper stand among those sciences that
deal with the external world.--_Buckle’s History of Civilization_, vol.
i.