Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/118

104 to be lost, but the titles of fifty-three of them are preserved, and they range from pneumatic engines to ways for making fresh water at sea, and from easier modes of whale-fishery to the invention of an artificial pavement, "harder, fairer, and cheaper than marble." One idea of Wren's was a method of infusing liquors directly into the living blood. This he showed at the lodge of Wadham to his interested colleagues, injecting liquid wax into the veins of animals; but nothing came of it in the end. This might be said of the majority of the experiments of the Invisible Philosophers. They were groping after physical truth in a gross darkness, and it constantly evaded them.

It was probably while they met in the lodge of Wadham College that the Invisibles began their system of inquiries. They set themselves ill an attitude of incessant interrogation. Some of them examined all the existing books of science, and corrected the careless observations therein set down. Others sought out sea-

men, travellers, and merchants, and propounded queries to them. We know what sort of problems interested them. Among the earliest subjects of their inquiry were the causes of the petrification of wood, of the eclipses of the moon, of currents in the sea; they were curious about the functions of the lodestone, and those of the organs of human and animal bodies. When they could secure correspondents in the still mysterious tropics they sent out schedules of questions to them. They asked, "Is there a fountain which gushes in pure balsam in Sumatra?" and the reply was, "No." They asked, "Is there a vegetable in Mexico that yields water, wine, vinegar, oil, milk, honey, wax, thread, and needles?" and the reply was, "Yes, the cocoanut-palm." They asked, "How do the master workmen of Pegu add to the color of their rubies?" but to this query they received no reply. They persevered until all England was alive with the spirit of scientific investigation, and until they had awakened in the cause of research the noble and inquisitive genius of the British merchant. They cultivated philosophic doubt, and they suffered danger from fanatic forms of religion. They were accused of being sceptics and of disturbing the canon of holy writ. But they allowed these vain accusations to pass over their heads unheeded.

Wilkins was presently translated to be master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Invisible Philosophers returned once more to London. Dr. Goddard, having been appointed to be Professor of Physics at Gresham College in 1655, had taken up his residence in that charming place. When the Invisible Philosophers ceased to meet in Oxford, they held their sessions in the rooms appointed for Dr. Goddard in the great