Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/459

 STEPHEN BALES 453

Alas! I copy, or my draught would fail, From honest Mahomet or plain Parson Hale.

I confess I don't know what this means, but one can see a very un- warrantable liberty taken with Hales's name. The poef s own note on this is :

Dr. Stephen Hale not more estimable for his useful discoveries as a natural philosopher than for his exemplary life and pastoral charity as a parish priest.

Pope, however, has left it on record that he highly disapproved of the doctor's vivisectional experiments. Peg WoflBngton, the actress, was for a time a parishioner of Hales.

We strongly suspect that the theology of Hales was ponderous and his religious discourses dull. Absolutely correct as regards the sex morality of his own life, he appears to have dealt pretty severely with any erring members of his flock, for there is extant a list of names of women wham he made do public penance in church in a manner more resembling the custom amongst the strictest of the Scottish Covenanters than that of English Episcopalians.

At least one sermon that Hales delivered has come down to us, be- cause it was published as the anniversary sermon preached before the Boyal College of Physicians in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow on Sep- tember 21, 1751. It is now a rare pamphlet, entitled "^The wisdom and goodness of God in the formation of msm,' preached according to the institution of Dr. Crowne and his widow, the Lady Sadler, by Stephen Hales, D.D., P.K.S., Clerk of the Closet to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales.^' It is so full of curious anatomical and physio- logical allusions that it reads far more like a lecture in natural history than what we should consider a sermon. Another sermon preached by Hales in 1734 has come down to us. His text was Gal. VI., v. 2, the audience the trustees of the colony of Georgia, for Hales was one of the trustees of this newly founded colony (1733).

Another of Hales^s neighbors was the dilettante, Horace Walpole, who lived near by at Strawberry Hill ; he wrote cynically of Hales as a ''poor, good, primitive creature.^' A far better judge, the physi- ologist Haller, declared that Hales was "pious, modest, indefatigable and born for the discovery of truth.^^

Hales must have been modest, for there are very few references to him in contemporary literature. He is not once mentioned in the chapter on Science in Ashton^s " Social life in the reign of Queen Anne.'* By his scientific peers, however, his worth was fully recognized. In 1726 the University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of D.D. The Boyal Academy of Sciences at Paris in 1753 elected Hales one of the eight foreign members in the room of Sir Hans Sloane, Bart: deceased.

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