Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/244

232 he writes to Lady Carteret, "I have stayed in the city till above seventy-four hundred died in one week, and of them about six thousand of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells."

The meetings were renewed again March 14, 1666. As was to be expected, we find that the medical Fellows had some report to make of their studies of such a direful disease. In consideration of the present agitation of the germ theory of disease, it is interesting to find recorded that "Dr. Charlton advanced his notion concerning the vermigation of the air as the cause of the plague, first started in England by Sir George Ent, and Dr. Bacon in Rome. It had been observed that there was a kind of insect in the air, which, being put upon a man's hand, would lay eggs hardly discernible without a microscope, which eggs being for an experiment given to be snuffed up by a dog, the dog fell into a distemper, accompanied with all the symptoms of the plague."

September 5, 1666.—The journal has this passage: "The society could not meet by reason of the late dreadfull Fire in London."

The calamity of the many is often the opportunity for the few. The flames which brought such loss and suffering upon London, swept away all obstacles to the making of England's greatest architect. In the ashes of St. Paul's Wren found his opportunity and fame. Up to this time architecture had been but one of many of the studies of Sir Christopher. Even when a gentleman-commoner at Oxford he was noted for his attainments and inventions in mathematical and experimental philosophy. Mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and anatomy shared with architecture in his attention, and such was his skill in them all that Evelyn styled him "that rare and early prodigy of universal science."

Wren was one of the founders of the Royal Society, and was at one time Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, where the society first met. It has been justly observed that, "but for the fire, Wren might have trifled away his genius, patching the old cathedral, and perhaps adding a new wing to Whitehall." But fortunately the fire found him still young, being but thirty-three, and in the nearly threescore years still allotted him to labor, he industriously followed his chosen science. Besides fifty-odd churches, Wren designed and built the Royal Exchange, Custom-House, Royal Observatory, College of Physicians, Greenwich Hospital, Buckingham House, Marlborough House, the towers of the west front of Westminster Abbey, and many other noble structures. But the crowning work of his life was his remodeling and rebuilding St. Paul's, which is esteemed the finest specimen of its order in the world. Wren's salary as architect of this masterpiece was less than a thousand dollars per annum, for which he was not only architect but draughtsman, overseer, contractor, and