Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/689

Rh the concentration, disinterestedness, and, above all, the indefeasible patience, which mark the highest order of minds. Among the contemporaries of Newton, he approached most nearly to and contrasted most strongly with that great man, whose shining qualities and achievements have been set off by the convenient foil of his rival's defects of temper and fortune. It may perhaps be possible to derive a larger lesson from the consideration of his life's work than the trite moral conveyed by his exhibition in the character of the captive in the car of triumphant genius. In Newton the epoch was idealized; in Hooke it was simply reflected. We can study more conveniently the varying impulses and undefined aspirations of a period of transition and progress in the versatility which obeyed than in the steady purpose which transformed and dominated them. The greatest men are of all time; the lesser are an epitome of their age. They pass with it; but they teach in passing.

Hooke believed himself to be the disciple of Bacon; but his real instructors were men of a widely different and far less pretentious stamp. Experimental science does not date, even in England, from the "Chancellor of England and of Nature." Roma ante Romulum fuit. The Egremont Castle of traditional knowledge shook, it is true, to its foundations at the formidable blast of this new Sir Eustace, and the Peripatetic usurper heard in it his knell. But the fortress was already dismantled; a numerous and unrelenting foe had silently taken possession of its outworks and bastions, and, stone by stone, was busy turning the materials of the ancient stronghold to account in the construction of habitations of more modern aspect and accommodation.

Among the multifarious forms of activity stirred into life by the ferment of the Italian Renaissance, perhaps the least questionable in its results was that leading to the love and study of nature. Two men of singular genius, Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, led the way; and their example was followed by the astronomers, anatomists, physicians, and botanists, with whom, in the following century, Italy abounded. Mathematics were at the same time cultivated with signal success; and the learned enthusiasm which, a hundred years earlier, had hailed the unearthing of a long-forgotten codex by Poggio or Filelfo, now greeted the solution of a problem by Cardano, or the discovery of a formula by Ferri or Tartaglia. Nor did these abstract inquiries remain long unfruitful. The questions which had busied the brain of Archimedes at the siege of Syracuse began to emerge from the neglect of wellnigh eighteen centuries, and the "mechanical powers" of lever, pulley, screw, and inclined plane were once more, as our neighbors say, the order of the day. The movement was now no longer limited to the sub-Alpine peninsula. Simon Stevin, of far-away Bruges, and Michael Varro, of Geneva, deserve to be named, with Benedetti, of Venice, and Del Monte, of Pesaro, as the precursors of Galileo, whose strongest title to fame is that he first brought natural