Heroes of Science: Physicists - Garnett William

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and broken under him; but by a lusty youth, then accidentally in the room, was snatched from out the ruins, by which [Robert] had, in all probability, been immediately oppressed, had not his bed been curtained by a watchful Providence, which kept all heavy things from falling on it; but the dust of the crumbled rubbish raised was so thick that he might there have been stifled had not he remembered to wrap his head in the sheet, which served him as a strainer, through which none but the purer air could find a passage." At Eton he spent nearly four years, "in the last of which he forgot much of that Latin he had got, for he was so addicted to more solid parts of knowledge that he hated the study of bare words naturally, as something that relished too much of pedantry to consort with his disposition and designs." On leaving Eton he joined his father at Stalbridge, in Dorsetshire, and was sent to reside with "Mr. W. Douch, then parson of that place," who took the supervision of his studies. Here he renewed his acquaintance with Latin, and devoted some attention to English verse, spending some of his idle hours in composing verses, "most of which, the day he came of age, he sacrificed to Vulcan, with a design to make the rest perish by the same fate." A little later he returned to his father's house in Stalbridge, and was placed under the tutelage of a French gentleman, who had been tutor to two of his brothers.

      In October, 1638, Robert Boyle and his brother were sent into France. After a short stay at Lyons, they reached Geneva, where Robert remained with his tutor for about a year and three quarters. During his residence here an incident occurred which he regarded as the most important event of his life, and which we therefore give in his own words.

      "To frame a right apprehension of this, you must understand that, though his inclinations were ever virtuous, and his life free from scandal and inoffensive, yet had the piety he was master of already so diverted him from aspiring unto more, that Christ, who long had lain asleep in his conscience (as He once did in the ship), must now, as then, be waked by a storm. For at a time which (being the very heat of summer) promised nothing less, about the dead of night, that adds most terror to such accidents, [he] was suddenly waked in a fright with such loud claps of thunder (which are oftentimes very terrible in those hot climes and seasons), that he thought the earth would owe an ague to the air, and every clap was both preceded and attended with flashes of lightning, so frequent and so dazzling that [he] began to imagine them the sallies of that fire that must consume the world. The long continuance of that dismal tempest, where the winds were so loud as almost drowned the noise of the very thunder, and the showers so hideous as almost quenched the lightning ere it could reach his eyes, confirmed him in his apprehensions of the day of judgment's being at hand. Whereupon the consideration of his unpreparedness to welcome it, and the hideousness of being surprised by it in an unfit condition, made him resolve and vow that, if his fears were that night disappointed, all his further additions to his life should be more religiously and watchfully employed. The morning came, and a serene, cloudless sky returned, when he ratified his determinations so solemnly, that from that day he dated his conversion, renewing, now he was past danger, the vow he had made whilst he believed himself to be in it; and though his fear was (and he blushed it was so) the occasion of his resolution of amendment, yet at least he might not owe his more deliberate consecration of himself to piety to any less noble motive than that of its own excellence."

      After leaving Geneva, he crossed the Alps and travelled through Northern Italy. Here he spent much time in learning Italian; "the rest of his spare hours he spent in reading the modern history in Italian, and the new paradoxes of the great stargazer Galileo, whose ingenious books, perhaps because they could not be so otherwise, were confuted by a decree from Rome; his highness the Pope, it seems, presuming, and that justly, that the infallibility of his chair extended equally to determine points in philosophy as in religion, and loth to have the stability of that earth questioned in which he had established his kingdom."

      Having visited Rome, he at length returned to France, and was detained at Marseilles, awaiting a remittance from the earl to enable him to continue his travels. Through some miscarriage, the money which the earl sent did not arrive, and Robert and his brother had to depend on the credit of the tutor to procure the means to enable them to return home. They reached England in the summer of 1644, "where we found things in such confusion that, although the manor of Stalbridge were, by my father's decease, descended unto me, yet it was near four months before I could get thither." On reaching London, Robert Boyle resided for some time with his sister, Lady Ranelagh, and was thus prevented from entering the Royalist Army. Later on he returned for a short time to France; visited Cambridge in December, 1645, and then took up his residence at Stalbridge till May, 1650, where he commenced the study of chemistry and natural philosophy.

      It was in October, 1646, that Boyle first made mention of the "invisible college," which afterwards developed into the Royal Society. Writing to a Fellow of Magdalen College, Cambridge, in February, 1647, he says, "The corner-stones of the invisible, or, as they term themselves, the philosophical college, do now and then honour me with their company." It appears that a desire to escape from the troubles of the times had induced several persons to take refuge in philosophical pursuits, and, meeting together to discuss the subjects of their study, they formed the "invisible college." Boyle says, "I will conclude their praises with the recital of their chiefest fault, which is very incident to almost all good things, and that is, that there is not enough of them." Dr. Wallis, one of the first members of the society, states that Mr. Theodore Hooke, a German of the Palatinate, then resident in London, "gave the first occasion and first suggested those meetings and many others. These meetings we held sometimes at Dr. Goddard's lodging, in Wood Street (or some convenient place near), on occasion of his keeping an operator in his house, for grinding glasses for telescopes and microscopes, and sometimes at a convenient place in Cheapside; sometimes at Gresham College, or some place near adjoining. Our business was (precluding theology and State affairs) to discourse and consider of philosophical inquiries, and such as related thereunto; as physic, anatomy, geometry, astronomy, navigation, statics, magnetics, chemics, mechanics, and natural experiments, with the state of these studies as then cultivated at home and abroad. About the year 1648-49 some of us being removed to Oxford, first Dr. Wilkins, then I, and soon after Dr. Goddard, our company divided. Those in London continued to meet there as before, and we with them when we had occasion to be there. And those of us at Oxford, with Dr. Ward, since Bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Ralph Bathurst, now President of Trinity College in Oxford, Dr. Petty, since Sir William Petty, Dr. Willis, then an eminent physician in Oxford, and divers others, continued such meetings in Oxford, and brought those studies into fashion there; meeting first at Dr. Petty's lodgings, in an apothecary's house, because of the convenience of inspecting drugs and the like, as there was occasion; and after his remove to Ireland (though not so constantly) at the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, then Warden of Wadham College; and after his removal to Trinity College in Cambridge, at the lodgings of the Honourable Mr. Robert Boyle, then resident for divers years in Oxford. These meetings in London continued, and after the king's return, in 1660, were increased with the accession of divers worthy and honourable persons, and were afterwards incorporated by the name of the Royal Society, and so continue to this day."

      Boyle was only about twenty years of age when he wrote his "Free Discourse against Swearing;" his "Seraphic Love; or, Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God;" and his "Essay on Mistaken Modesty." "Seraphic Love" was the last of a series of treatises on love, but the only one of the series that he published, as he considered the others too trifling to be published alone or in conjunction with it. In a letter to Lady Ranelagh, he refers to his laboratory as "a kind of Elysium," and there were few things which gave him so much pleasure as his furnaces and philosophical experiments. In 1652 he visited Ireland, returning in the following summer. In the autumn he was again obliged to visit Ireland, and remained there till the summer of 1654, though residence in that country was far from agreeable to him. He styled it "a barbarous country, where chemical spirits were so misunderstood, and chemical instruments so unprocurable, that it was hard to have any hermetic thoughts in it." On his return he settled in Oxford, and there his lodgings soon became the centre of the scientific life of the university. Boyle and his friends may be regarded as the pioneers of experimental philosophy in this country. To Boyle the methods of Aristotle appeared little more than discussions on words; for a long time he refused to study the philosophy of Descartes, lest he should be turned aside from reasoning based strictly on the results of experiment. The method pursued by these philosophers had been fully

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