Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/115



famous as the author of three most ingenious books, A New Habitable World in the Moon, Is Our Earth One of the Planets? and Mercury—works in which Wilkins, with a kind of magician's instinct, forestalled a variety of modern discoveries and inventions.

But the presiding spirit among the Invisible Philosophers seems to have been that "lover of virtue," as he styled himself, the Hon. Robert Boyle. Nothing is more curious than the comparative obscurity which has clouded the once blazing reputation of this man, who seemed to his contemporaries another Aristotle. It was even seriously suggested that the soul of Bacon, who died very shortly before Boyle's birth, was reincarnated in the younger philosopher, who seemed destined to carry the Baconian theories into universal practice. The fourteenth child of that sturdy nobleman the Earl of Cork, Robert Boyle was born at Lismore on the 25th of January, 1627. He was amazing in his childhood, and he evinced in early boyhood "so strong a passion to acquire knowledge" that his teachers at Eton, alarmed for his health, had "to force him out to play." What the child was the man remained. Like Browning's Grammarian, Robert Boyle was "soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst" for science; "this man decided not to Live, but Know"; and human annals supply us with no instance more astonishing or more pathetic of the abandonment of everything that makes existence agreeable for the sake of an insatiable longing for knowledge.

When he was eleven years of age, being already an excellent scholar, Robert Boyle, as befitted a young aristocrat of his tastes and station, started on the Grand Tour. He has left a fragmentary account of his adventures, composed, with the gravity of an elderly person, at the age of seventeen. At Florence he became interested in "the new paradoxes of the great star-gazer" Galileo, who died while he was in that city, and about whose blindness the boy has a charming phrase, that Galileo "had the satisfaction of not being blind till he had seen in heaven what never mortal eyes beheld before." Long before this, indeed, the reading of Quintus Curtius, so he says, had started Boyle "in the unsatisfied love of knowledge," but he began his scientific experiments in "the melancholy solitude" of