Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/814

794 hoarded wealth, which proved as barren after his death as it had been during his life.

Imprisoned in his own egotism, he did not know how to contribute his quota generously to the long day's labor of humanity. He sought to set his trade-mark on every thought. He would have desired a patent of protection for every experiment. His work was in consequence visited with the curse of sterility. A slave to meum and tuum—in his own words, "the great rudder of human affairs"—his peevish reclamations were met with the inexorable Sic vos non vobis of ironical destiny. Of the innumerable inventions which he originated, scarcely one has been associated with his name. His suggestions bore fruit in the hands of others. His ideas were appropriated and perfected by his rivals. His experiments conferred luster on his successors. By tacit consent, his intellectual inheritance was divided, and his claims ignored. Newton took up the theory of light where he abandoned it, and left him far behind in the momentous search for the law of gravitation. Mayow carried forward the investigations which he had set on foot as to the purpose subserved by the air in respiration. His method was used by Picard in 1670, with striking success, in his new measurement of the earth. His observations formed the basis upon which Bradley founded, in 1728, his discovery of the aberration of light. That his repeated disappointments and mischances were in any degree attributable to his own deficiencies, naturally did not occur to him. It was simpler and more consolatory to set them down to the prevalent malignity and injustice of mankind. Hence the deepening shade of misanthropy which enveloped in saturnine reserve the later years of his life.

Nevertheless, Hooke was, in spite of conspicuous defects, by no means a bad man. His morals were irreproachable, his diligence was untiring, and his religious sentiments seem to have been unfeignedly devout. His faults were warpings of the mind, closely dependent, perhaps, on his unfortunate physical constitution. In spirit, as well as in person, Nature had set him somewhat awry. "Certainly," writes Bacon, "there is a consent between the body and the mind; and where Nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other. Ubi peccat in uno, periclitatur in altero." It was his misfortune that he could neither win sympathy nor inspire pity. His talents earned for him patronage; but his peculiarities repelled friendship. He lived sixty-eight years without attaching to himself a single human being, and died only to make room for his rival. And yet his intellectual qualities did not demand admiration more than his moral failings claimed tenderness. For surely infirmity has been rarely combined with genius in more painful and pitiable guise than in Robert Hooke.—Edinburgh Review.