Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/460

 454 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

The botanist, John EUIb, named a genuB of plants, Haiesia, in honor of him.

Hales's portrait was painted by Thomas Hudson (1701-1779), an English artist who had the honor to have Beynolds for a pupil. The monument in the Abbey is by Wilton who executed Wolfe's in the same sanctuaiy.

One of the most scholarly accounts of Hales is from the pen of Pro- fessor Percy M. Dawson, M.D.

To arrive at any definite ideas as regards Hales's views on his own times or on the society of his day is very difficult, since almost all that we know of him is in an exclusively scientific environment. Seeing that his patrons were the Prince and Princess of Wales and that he was quite intimate with the Duke of Cumberland, he could hardly have been other than an ardent Hanoverian. From all that we have to judge by, Hales's personal tastes harmonized with the Georgian Philistinism around him, for he is reported to have removed a beautiful east window in the church at Teddington, substituting for it something of greatly inferior beauty.

Hales lived through a period that was by no means destitute of incident; it included the Handel-Buononcini controversy, the Jacobite Bising, the quarrels of George II. with his eldest son, the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, the failure of the great attack on Carthagena (1741), the development of Britain's resources under the peaceful ad- ministration of Sir Robert Walpole, the commencement of the vigorous rule of William Pitt the elder, Wolfe's magnificent achievement on the Heights of Abraham, Olive's crushing of Surajah-Dowlah at Plassey, the reform of the calendar and the preaching of Wesley.

Pope, Gay, Young, Thomson, Oowper, Johnson, Gray and Oollins in literature ; Hogarth, Gainsborough and Sir Joshua in art, Handel in music, and Sir Hans Sloane in science are the names of honorable men- tion during the life-time of the Rev. Dr. Hales.

While we congratulate ourselves on having attained to an under- standing of the principles of ventilation, on having abolished typhus fever from our hospitals, prisons and ships, on having devised apparatus for sustaining life in irrespirable and deadly atmospheres, let us never forget that the initial stages in the comprehension of these things were worked out not by any high-placed, well-paid, public official, but by a modest amateur, the scientifically minded, country clergyman, Stephen Hales.

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