Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/242

230 founding a true science. A prodigy even in childhood, having entered Eton College when but eight years of age, he further enjoyed the advantages of European travels and education. He visited Florence in 1641, and spent the winter there studying the works of Galileo. He may have caught from the words of the then blind old astronomer, as he dictated to his disciples his last work on the "Impact of Bodies," that unwavering devotion to natural science which characterized both men. Returning to England, he gathered around him a circle of congenial friends, which formed the Invisible College, of which he in his works so frequently makes mention, and which subsequently became the Royal Society.

He was a prolific contributor to the "Transactions," all based upon his own investigations. His improved air-pump and his experiments with it contributed largely to the knowledge of the properties of air and the character of sound, and his work, "Experiments and Considerations upon Colours," prepared the way for Newton's more elaborate work upon the same subject. It is said that Boyle in the latter part of his life was accustomed, when engaged upon any of his important experiments, to write above his street-door, "Mr. Boyle can not be spoken with to-day."

The mere enumeration of the contributions of Boyle would fill a page, but he gleaned in too many fields to thoroughly exhaust any one. By his contemporaries Boyle was considered one of the greatest natural philosophers, and if the succeeding generations failed to retain the same high estimate of his position it is because he was succeeded by some of the greatest minds in English thought. It is sufficient for one man's fame that he originated the Royal Society.

November 12, 1662.—Robert Hooke, an assistant to Boyle, was elected a Fellow. He was but twenty-seven years old, yet as the result of his innumerable experiments "facts multiplied, leading phenomena became prominent, laws began to emerge, and generalizations to commence."

Hooke was possessed of a mind inventive and mechanical to a high degree, which led him to the threshold of some of the grandest discoveries of his time. His experiments, however, like Boyle's, were too diffuse, and he repeatedly was mortified by seeing his nearly completed discoveries anticipated. Hooke was a genius, but through lack of concentration cut a sorry figure, from always being a little too late. From the controversy with Huygens in relation to the invention of the balance-spring of watches, it was shown that he was entitled to the original conception, but that its practical application as a coil belongs to Huygens.

He had a faint conception of the undulatory theory of light; he discovered the mechanical laws which govern the motions of