Part 72

The apothecaries and grocers received a charter in 1607, but in 1618, the apothecaries were given the sole right to purchase and sell potions, and to search the shops of grocers and stop the sale by them of any potions. In London, the apothecaries were looked over by the College of Physicians to see that they were not selling evil potions or poisons. In 1618 was the first pharmacy book.

There were three hospitals in London, two for the poor, and Bedlam [Bethlehem] Hospital for the insane. Others were treated at home or in the physician's home.

Theaters were shut down in times of plague to prevent spread of disease there. Towndwellers who could afford it left to live in the country.

Shakespeare wrote most of his plays. Most popular reading was still Bibles, prayer books, psalm books, and devotional works. Also popular were almanacs, which started with a single sheet of paper. An almanac usually had a calendar; information on fairs, roads, and posts; farming hints; popularized scientific knowledge; historical information; sensational news; astrological predictions; and later, social, political, and religious comment. Many households had an almanac. Books tried to reconcile religion and science and religion and passion or sensuality. Walter Ralegh's "History of the World", written while he was in prison, was popular. Ben Johnson wrote poetry and satiric comedies. Gentlemen read books of manners such as James Cleland's "Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607). In 1622, the first regular weekly newspaper was started.

Although there was a large advance in the quality of boys' education and in literacy, the great majority of the people were unable to read fluently. Since writing was taught after one could read fluently, literacy was indicated by the ability to sign one's name. Almost all gentlemen and professional men were literate. About half the yeomen and tradesmen and craftsmen were. Only about 15% of husbandmen, laborers, servants, and women were literate.

The royal postal system carried private as well as royal letters, to increase income to the Crown. Postmasters got regular pay for handling without charge the mail of letters that came from or went to the letter office in London. The postmaster kept horses which he let, with horn and guide, to persons riding "in post" at 3d. per mile. The post was to travel 7 mph in summer and 5 mph in winter and sound his horn four times in every mile or whenever he met travelers.

Wool and animals for butchering were sold in London with the sellers' agent in London taking the proceeds and paying out to their order, the origin of check writing.

Scriveners drew up legal documents, arranged mortgages, handled property transactions, and put borrowers in touch with lenders. They and the goldsmiths and merchants developed promissory notes, checks, and private paper money.

The influx of silver from the New World was a major factor in the second great inflation in England and in the devaluation of money to about one third of what it had been. Also contributing to the inflation was an outracing of demand over supply, and a debasement of the coinage. This inflation benefited tenants to the detriment of their lords because their rents could not be adjusted upward.

There was an increase in bankruptcies.

The Elizabethan love of madrigal playing gradually gave way to a taste for instrumental music, including organs and flutes. The violin was introduced and popular with all classes. Ballads were sung, such as "Barbary Allen", about a young man who died for love of her, after which she died of sorrow. When they were buried next to each other, a rose from his grave grew around a briar from her grave. The ballad "Geordie" relates a story of a man hanged for stealing and selling sixteen of the king's royal deer. The ballad "Matty Groves" is about a great Lord's fair young bride seducing a lad, who was then killed by the Lord. In the ballad "Henry Martin", the youngest man of three brothers is chosen by lot to turn pirate to support his brothers. When his pirate ship tries to take a merchant ship, there is sea fight in which the merchant ship sinks and her men drown. The ballad "The Trees They Do Grow High" tells of an arranged marriage between a 24 year old woman and the 14 year old son of a great lord. She tied blue ribbons on his head when he went to college to let the maidens know that he was married. But he died at age 16, after having sired a son.

May Day was a holiday with dancing around a Maypole and people dressed up as characters such as Queen of the May, Robin Hood, Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marion, the fool, and the piper. New Year's Day was changed to January 1st.

Golf was played in Scotland, and James introduced it into England. James I was the last monarch to engage in falconry.

Francis Bacon wrote the "Advancement of Learning" and "Novum Organum" (New Learning) in which he encouraged the use of the inductive method to find out scientific truths and also truths in general, that is reasoning from a sample to the whole. According to him, the only way to arrive at the truth was to observe and determine the correlations of facts. He advocated a process of elimination of ideas. His "New Learning" showed the way out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the experimental method. He wrote "Natural and Experimental History". He also studied the effect of cold in preventing animal putrefaction.

Galileo Galilei, professor of mathematics at the University of Padua in Italy, conducted experiments, e.g. throwing objects off the tower of Pisa in 1590 to show that all, whether light or heavy, fall at the same rate. This disproved the widely held theory that heavier objects fall faster than light objects. He proved that the force of gravity has the same effect on all objects regardless of their size or weight. His law stated that the speed of their descent increases uniformly with the time of the fall, i.e. speed = gravity times time. Galileo determined that a pendulum, such as a hanging lamp, swings back and forth in equal intervals of time. For this he measured time with water running out of a vessel. Also, the rate of oscillation varies inversely as the square of their cord length, regardless of material or weight. From his observation that an object sliding along a plane slows down at a decreasing rate and travels increasingly farther as the surfaces become smoother and more lubricated, he opined that the natural state of a body in motion is to stay in motion, and that it is slowed down by a force: friction. He conceived of the air offering a resistant force to an object in motion. He expanded on Aristotle's idea of an object in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, so that the former is just a special case of the latter. He opined that bodies at rest stay at rest and bodies in motion stay in uniform motion, unless and until acted upon by some force. So motion need not be explained by the continuing force of a prime mover. He drew a graph of distance versus time for the rolling ball, which indicated that the distance traveled was a square of the time elapsed. He realized that the movement of a projectile involved a horizontal and a vertical component and guessed that the effects of falling were independent of the horizontal motion. He demonstrated that a projectile follows a path of a parabola, instead of a straight line, and that it too descends a distance which is the square of the time taken to fall. That is, a thrown object will strike the ground in the same amount of time as an object simply dropped from the same height.

The telescope was invented in 1608. The next year, Galileo built a greatly improved telescope using a lens to look at the skies. He observed that the surface of the moon had mountains, valleys, and craters much like the earth, and was illuminated by reflected light. He noticed that the planet Jupiter has moons orbiting it. He noted that the planet Venus progresses through phases similar to those of the moon orbiting the earth and that it was very large with a crescent shape or very small with a round shape. This apparent change in size could only be explained if Venus revolved around the sun, rather than around the earth. Thus more credence was given to the Copernican theory that the earth and all planets revolve around the sun, so Galileo was denounced by the church. He argued against a literal interpretation of the Bible. His observation that certain sun spots were on certain locations of the sun but changed over time suggested that the sun might be rotating. He observed that when air was withdrawn by a suction pump from the top of a long glass tube whose lower open end was submerged in a pan of water, the water rose to a height of 34 feet and no higher. He had demonstrated that there was such a thing as a vacuum, which was above the level of the water. About 1600, Galileo invented the first thermometer by heating air at the top of a tube whose open end was in a bowl of water; as the top end cooled, the air contracted and water rose partway up the tube; the column of water rose or fell with every change of temperature. Galileo invented the compound refracting microscope, which used more than one lens, about 1612.

Galileo's book on the arguments for and against the Copernican theory was unexpectedly popular when published in 1632. The general public was so persuaded by the arguments that the earth revolved around the sun that Papal authority felt threatened. So Galileo was tried and convicted of heresy and sentenced to prison as an example to others who might question church doctrine, even though the seventy year old Galileo recanted and some of the inquisition judges who convicted him believed the Copernican theory and their decision did not assert the contrary.

John Napier, a large Calvinist landholder in Scotland who had built his own castle, did mathematics in his older years. He explored imaginary numbers such as the square roots of negative numbers. By 1614, he had started and developed the theory of logarithms: the relationships among positive and negative exponents of numbers. This simplified calculations because the multiplication and division of numbers would be equivalent to addition and subtraction of their exponents. His table of logarithms, which took him twenty years to compile, was used in trigonometry, navigation, and astronomy. It reduced the enormous labor involved in trigonometric calculations.

Johannes Kepler was a mathematician from Germany who made his living as an astrologer. He was in contact with Galileo by letter, as most scientists of Europe were with each other. Kepler was fascinated with perfect geometric shapes, which he tried to relate to celestial phenomenon. He discerned that the orbit of Mars was not perfectly circular. He knew that the apparent path of the sun with respect to the constellation of fixed stars differed in speed at different times of the year. He opined that this showed that the speed of the earth revolving around the sun varied according to the time of year. Then he measured the angles between the earth and the sun and the earth and Mars as they changed through the Martian year. He noted when the earth, Mars, and the Sun were on the same straight line. Then he deduced the earth's true orbit, and from this the true orbits of the other planets. Then by trial and error, he attempted to match this empirical data with regular mathematically defined shapes, until he discovered in 1609 that these paths were elliptical. Also, the planets each move faster when they are nearer the sun and more slowly when they are farther from the sun so that in equal time intervals, a line from the planet to the sun will sweep out equal areas. This observation led him to opine that there is a force between the sun and each planet, and that this force is the same as that which keeps the moon in its orbit around the earth. Thirdly, in 1619, he found that the square of the time for each planet's orbit about the sun is proportional to the cube of that planet's mean distance from the sun, so that the farther planets orbit at a slower speed. He connected the earth's tides with the gravitational pull of the moon. Kepler also confirmed that the paths of comets were governed by a law and were farther from the earth from the moon. This contradicted the church's explanation that what lies within the moon's orbit pertains to the earth and is essentially transitory and evil, while what lies beyond belongs to the heavens and is permanent and pure.

In 1637, Renee Descartes, a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist from France, invented analytic [Cartesian] geometry, in which lines and geometric shapes can be described by algebraic equations and vice-versa. An algebraic equation with two unknowns, or variables, could be represented as a shape on a coordinate system in which each point is represented by a pair of numbers representing distances from the two axis lines. He started the convention of representing unknown quantities by x, y, and z and known quantities by a, b, and c. So, for instance, a circle with center at point 2,3 and a radius of 4 was represented by the equation: (x-2) squared + (y-3) squared = 4. All conic sections, e.g. ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas, could be represented by equations. Analytic geometry aided in making good lenses for eyeglasses. The glass was first manufactured with attention to quality. Then, after it cooled and solidified, the clearest pieces were picked and their surfaces ground into the proper curvature. Descartes pioneered the standard exponential notation for cubes and higher powers of numbers. He formulated the sine-law of refraction, which determines in general the way a light ray is deflected, according to the density of the media through which it passes. This explained why a rainbow is circular. In 1644, he described the universe in terms of matter and motion and suggested that there were universal laws and an evolutionary explanation for such. He opined that all effects in nature could be explained by spatial extension and motion laws that 1) each part of matter retains the shape, size, motion, or rest unless collision with another part occurs; 2) one part of matter can only gain as much motion through collision as is lost by the part colliding with it; and 3) motion tends to be rectilinear. These ideas did not correlate with the Biblical notion of the creation of the universe by God in seven days, so Descartes feared persecution by the church. Descartes believed in a good and perfect God, and thought of the world as divided into matter and spirit. The human mind was spirit and could exist outside the human body. The human mind had knowledge without sense experience, e.g. the truths of mathematics and physics. Ideas and imagination were innate. His observation that sensory appearances are often misleading, such as in dreams or hallucinations, led him to the conclusion that he could only conclude that: "I think, therefore I am." He rejected the doctrine that things had a proper behavior according to their natures, e.g. the nature of acorns is to develop into oak trees. As an example of erroneous forming of conceptions of substance with our senses alone, he pointed out that honeycomb has a certain taste, scent, and texture, but if exposed to fire, it loses all these forms and assumes others. He expressed that it was error to believe that there are no bodies around us except those perceivable by our senses. He was a strong proponent of the deductive method of finding truths, e.g. arguing logically from a very few self- evident principles, known by intuition, to determine the nature of the universe.

Christian Huygens, a Dutch physicist, used the melting and the boiling point of water as fixed points in a scale of measurements, which first gave definiteness to thermometric tests.

In 1600 William Gilbert, son of a gentleman, and physician to Queen Elizabeth, wrote a book on terrestrial magnetism which founded the science of electricity. He cultivated the method of experiment and of inductive reasoning from observation and insisted on the need for a search for knowledge not in books but in things themselves. He showed that the earth was a great magnet with a north pole and a south pole, by comparing it to loadstones made into spheres in which a north and south pole could be found by intersecting lines of magnetism indicated by a needle on the stone. The vertical dip of the needle was explained by the magnetic attraction of the north pole. He showed how a loadstone's declination could be used to determine latitude at sea. He showed how the charge of a body could be retained some time by covering the body with some non-conducting substance, such as silk. He distinguished magnetism from electricity, giving the latter its name. He discovered that atmospheric conditions affected the production of electricity, dryness decreasing it, and moisture increasing it. He expounded the idea of Copernicus that the earth revolves around the sun in a solar system. However, the prevailing belief was still that the earth was at the center of the universe.

There was much mining of coal, tin, copper, lead, and iron in the 1600s. Coal was transported from the coal pits down to the rivers to be loaded onto ships on coal wagons riding on wooden rails. The full coal cars could then be sent down by gravity and the empty wagons pulled up by horses. Sheet metal, e.g. lead, was used for roofing. Coal was much used for heating houses, and for laundry, cooking, and industrial use, such as extraction of salt, soap boilers, and manufacture of glass, bricks and tiles for buildings, anchors for ships, and tobacco pipes. It was used in the trades: bakers, confectioners, brewers, dyers, sugar refiners, coopers, starch makers, copper workers, alum makers, and iron workers.

In 1604 the Haberdashers, who sold imported felt for hats, got a charter of incorporation.

A tapestry factory was established in 1619.

Flax-working machines came into existence.

As Attorney General, Edward Coke was impassioned and melodramatic. He once described the parts of the penalty of treason as follows: being drawn to the place of execution reflected the person's not being worthy any more to tread upon the face of the earth; being drawn backward at a horse tail was due to his retrograde nature; being drawn head downward on the ground indicated that he was unfit to breathe the common air; being hanged by the neck between heaven and earth indicated that he was unworthy of either; being cut down alive and his privy parts cut off and burnt before his face indicated he was unworthily begotten and unfit to leave any generation after him; having his bowels and inners taken out and burnt indicated he had inwardly conceived and harbored such horrible treason; his head cut off, which had imagined the treason, and his body to be quartered and the quarters set up to the view and detestation of men a prey for the fowls of the air. Coke was subsequently elevated to the position of Chief of Common Pleas and then to Chief of the King's Bench. But there Coke propounded a doctrine of the supremacy of the law over the king as well as over Parliament. For instance, Coke would not agree to stay any case in which the king had a concern in power or profit, to consult with him. But the other eleven justices did agree. Since James I believed in the divine right of kings, he therefore dismissed Coke from his position as Chief Justice of the King's Bench. James even believed that he could suspend any law for reasons known only to him and issue proclamations that were not limited to the reinforcement of old laws, but made new offenses with punishment of fine and/or imprisonment.

Coke then became a member of Parliament and led the Commons, where he exalted the authority of Parliament vis a vis the king; that is, the king could not make any changes in law, religion, or taxation without consent of Parliament. James arrested Coke and two other members of the Commons and put its leader John Pym under house arrest for their outspoken opinions against the King's intended alliance with Catholic Spain and intended taking of a Spanish wife. Because of the deadlock that developed between the king and Parliament, certain matters could not be addressed by legislation and were left to be decided judicially. This made judicial review important.