Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/813

Rh who, during Hooke's lifetime had never sat at the council-table of the Royal Society, was, only a few months after his decease, elected both to that position and the still higher one of President, on the same day, November 30, 1703.

Not much now remains to be said. Hooke's growing infirmities of mind and body condemned him to isolation; and isolation is the chosen ally of eccentricity. Repeated disappointments had aggravated the inherent moroseness of his disposition; increasing ill health soured his naturally irritable temper; and the death, in 1687, of his niece, Mrs. Grace Hooke—probably the only person in the world for whom he entertained a sincere attachment—broke the last link uniting him to every-day humanity. Still he pursued his investigations with a feverish energy that age and sickness seemed rather to stimulate than to quell. His jealousy of piratical appropriation increased, with advancing years, almost to a mania; he enveloped his researches in a mysterious reserve; and many of the discoveries which he professed to have made, descended with him into the grave. Among these were a means of finding the longitude at sea, and a secret for perfecting all kinds of optical instruments. It might be conjectured, from the small size of some telescopes used by him, that this latter invention approached that of achromatism (made by Dollond in the middle of the following century); but, on the other hand, we find him laying it down as an axiom that increased power could only be obtained by increased focal length; and he is even said to have entertained as a possibility the construction of an instrument ten thousand feet long, which should bring into view the inhabitants of the moon! We can not, indeed, take his own word for his performances. He was probably not deliberately untruthful; but he was sanguine as well as vain, and apt to discourse largely of results, toward which imagination pointed, but which reason had not yet grasped. The Royal Society, at any rate, so far believed his professions as to make him, in 1696, a grant for the purpose of completing his researches and recording his discoveries. The remaining years of his life and his failing physical powers were dedicated, with almost insane zeal, to the task of raising an adequate monument to his experimental genius. Disease was powerless to divert him from his purpose; fatigue never seemed to approach him. Day after day, and night after night, he meditated, experimented, invented. For several years before his death, he was said never to have undressed or gone to bed. His limbs swelled, his brain reeled, his very eyesight failed; but still he worked, and wrote, and dreamed of immortality. At length a summons came which he was powerless to resist. He died on March 3, 1703, unloved, unlamented, and, at least in his own apprehension, unrecognized. He died, as he had lived, haunted by unfulfilled hopes, and deluded with abortive projects. In the midst of voluntary destitution, he had cherished a magnificent design for the endowment of the Royal Society. But he left no testamentary disposition of his