Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/34

 pettyfoggers; in physics so many quacksalvers, and in country schools so many grammaticasters.' Some such plan he seems in subsequent years to have proposed to carry out under the name of a Glottical College, but the circumstances of the time were adverse and the scheme was abandoned. He also wished for the establishment of a 'Gymnasium Mechanicum,' or 'College of Tradesmen,' to be such that one at least of every trade (the prime most ingenious workman) might be elected a Fellow, and allowed therein a handsome dwelling rent free. From such an institution the projector conceived that all trades not only 'would miraculously progress and new inventions be more frequent, but that there would also be the best and most effectual opportunities and means for writing a history of Trades in perfection and exactnesse.' 'What experiments and stuffe,' he says, 'would all those shops and operations afford for active and philosophical heads, out of which to extract whereof there is so little and so bad, as yet extant in the world!' There was also to be a 'Nosocomium Academicum,' or model hospital for the benefit of the scientific practitioner, as well as of the patient. The design concludes with the expression of a regret that no 'Society of Men' as yet exists 'as careful to advance arts as the Jesuits are to propagate their religion,' and with a suggestion of a work on the lines of Bacon's 'Advancement of Learning,' which should be a treatise on 'Nature free,' or on arts and manufactures relieved of restraint, in contrast with a 'History of Nature vexed and disturbed,' or of trade under the restraints of the then existing commercial system.

'I have put into your hands the design of the history of trade,' Hartlib wrote to Robert Boyle; 'the author is one Petty, twenty-four years of age, a perfect Frenchman, and a good linguist in other vulgar languages, besides Latin and Greek; a most rare and exact anatomist and excelling in all mathematical and mechanical learning; of a sweet natural disposition and moral comportment. As for solid judgment and industry, altogether masculine.' Boyle gave him a