CHAPTER XII. Oxford: a Learned Junto

OXFORD: A LEARNED JUNTO

“... I see no cause to despair that, whether or no my writings be protected, the truths they hold forth will in time, in spite of opposition, establish themselves in the minds of men, as the circulation of the blood, and other, formerly much contested, truths have already done. My humour has naturally made me too careful not to offend those I dissent from, to make it necessary for any man to be my adversary upon the account of personal injuries or provocations. And as for any whom either judgment or envy may invite to contend, that the things I have communicated to the world deserved not so much applause as they have had the luck to be entertained with; that shall make no quarrel betwixt us: for perhaps I am myself as much of that mind as he; and however I shall not scruple to profess myself one of those who is more desirous to spend his time usefully, than to have the glory of leaving nothing that was ever written against himself unanswered; and who is more solicitous to pursue the ways of discovering truth than to have it thought that he never was so much subject to human frailties as to miss it.”—ROBERT BOYLE: Preface to A Defence of the Doctrine touching the Spring and Weight of the Air.

Several of the original Philosophical Society had migrated to Oxford before Robert Boyle joined them there. Dr. Wilkins had been appointed Warden of Wadham at the Visitation and Purgation of the University in 1648; Dr. Wallis, at the same time, had been made Savilian Professor of Geometry; and Dr. Goddard, of Wood Street celebrity, had become Warden of Merton. Robert Boyle does not seem to have been in Oxford during the Encænia in July 1654. There is, at least, no mention of him in Evelyn’s description of “the civilities of Oxford” during that happy week; and the friendship between Boyle and Evelyn, that was to last “neare fourty yeares,” was not to begin till a little later. But Evelyn has described Oxford society exactly as it was when Robert Boyle entered it.

Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn arrived in Oxford “on the eve of the Act,” and next day, after midday dinner, “the Proctor opened the Act at St. Marie’s (according to custome) and the Prevaricators their drollery. Then the Doctors disputed. We supp’d at Wadham College.” On Sunday, Dr. French, Canon of Christ Church, the preacher at St. Mary’s, had his little fling at the Philosophers. “True wisdom,” he said, “was not to be had in the books of the Philosophers, but in the Scriptures alone.” He based his observations on a text from St. Matthew xii. 42: “And, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.” On Sunday afternoon the famous Independent, Dr. Owen, now “Cromwell’s Vice-Chancellor,” preached a wonderful sermon, “perstringing Episcopacy”—a sermon that Evelyn and some others present must have found particularly trying to listen to. They dined that day with Dr. Seth Ward, who had been one of the “Prevaricators” himself, when he was at Cambridge, and was so alarmingly witty on the occasion that he nearly lost his degree. And at night they supped in Balliol College Hall—Evelyn’s own college.

On Monday they sat through the whole Act in St. Mary’s;—the long speeches of the Proctors, Vice-Chancellors and Professors, and the creation of Doctors “by the cap, ring, kisse,” etc. The Inceptor made a most excellent oration, “abating his Presbyterian animosities which he could not withhold.” And after all this paraphernalia “there were but 4 in Theologie and 3 in Medicine,” which was thought not bad, “the times considered.” And again there was a magnificent supper with Evelyn’s “dear and excellent friend,” Dr. Wilkins of Wadham.

Happy days, two hundred and sixty years ago! There was music at All Souls, “voices and theorbos,” performed by “ingenious scholars.” And Dr. Barlow, the learned Librarian, took them over the Bodleian, and showed them all the treasures, including the 800-years-old manuscript of the Venerable Bede. The Divinity School vied with the Physical and Anatomical School in entertaining the visitors; and, at St. John’s, the Library was almost eclipsed by poor Laud’s gift of mathematical instruments, and by “2 skeletons, finely cleaned and put together.” New College Chapel, much to Evelyn’s satisfaction, was still in statu quo, “notwithstanding the scrupulosities of the times”; and at Christ Church they saw the “Office of Henry VIII,” the gift of Cardinal Wolsey, with its wonderful miniatures and gilding, and the famous painted windows of the Cathedral, now “much abused.” In Magdalen Chapel, everything was in its “pontificall order,” except that the Altar had been “turn’d table-wise;” and there the famous musician, Mr. Gibbon, kindly played to them upon the double organ. The Physick garden was visited, “where the sensitive plant was shewed us for a greate wonder.” Canes, olives and rhubarb grew there, “but no extraordinary curiosities, besides very good fruit, which, when the ladys had tasted, we return’d in our coach to our lodgings.”

And the Encænia festivities wound up with midday dinner at Wadham. “We all din’d at that most obliging and universally-curious Dr. Wilkins’s at Wadham College.” There, after dinner, they were shown the Warden’s new transparent beehives, from which the honey could be drawn without destroying the bees, and Evelyn was presented with an empty hive to carry back with him to his own garden at Deptford. Mr. Christopher Wren, that “prodigious young scholar,” that “miracle of a youth,” was of the company; and everybody wandered at will among Dr. Wilkins’s scientific and mechanical curiosities, conic sections, magnets, thermometers, “way-wisers,” and all the rest, in the upper rooms and gallery of the Warden’s lodging.

The Warden, it may be observed, was still a bachelor: it was not till two years later that he married Cromwell’s sister. At the time of Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn’s visit to Oxford, that lady was still Mrs. French, wife of the worthy Canon of Christ Church, who had preached on the text, “Behold, a greater than Solomon is here!”

This, then, was the Oxford of 1654 that was to welcome Robert Boyle. He had evidently been there, looking about him, during his flying visit from Ireland in 1653; and Lady Ranelagh—an experimentalist too in her own way—had gone to Oxford afterwards to inspect the lodgings selected by her brother.

“MY BROTHER,

“It has pleased God to bring us safe to Oxford, and I am lodged at Mr. Crosse’s, with design to be able to give you from experience an account which is the warmer room; and indeed I am satisfied with neither of them, as to that point, because the doors are placed so just by the chimnies, that if you have the benefit of the fire you must venture having the inconvenience of the wind, which yet may be helped in either by a folding skreen; and then I think that which looks into the garden will be the more comfortable, though he have near hanged, and intends to matt, that you lay in before. You are here much desired, and I could wish you here as soon as you can: for I think you would have both more liberty and more conversation than where you are, and both these will be necessary, both for your health and usefulness.”

Mr. Crosse was an apothecary, and his house was in the High Street, adjoining University College. He seems to have been recommended to Boyle as a convenient landlord, not only on account of Boyle’s own fickle health, but as one who might be useful to him in laboratory work. He was a staunch Churchman, and a particular friend of John Fell, the son of the famous old Royalist Dean of Christ Church, who had been ejected at the Visitation of 1648. Many scenes have been enacted in Christ Church quadrangle, but none more melodramatic than the ejection of Mrs. Fell and her family after the Dean himself had been carried off in custody to London. Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn must have shaken their heads indeed if they were shown the identical spot in the Quad where Mrs. Fell and her lady friends had been deposited, having chosen to be forcibly carried out, rather than voluntarily walk out, of the Deanery. John Fell, the son, a student of Christ Church, had been ejected too, but he lived on in Oxford; and one of his sisters married Dr. Willis, the physician, who set up in practice in a house in Merton Street, opposite to Merton College. In a room in this house, thanks to John Fell and his brother-in-law Dr. Willis, with one or two more strong Churchmen, the Services of the Church were to be privately maintained through all the years of the Commonwealth.

Did Robert Boyle, Geneva-bred, make one of the little semi-forbidden congregation of men and women that gathered in Dr. Willis’s house for service and Communion? It is doubtful. Boyle’s own letter to John Durie, written in 1647, speaks his mind on denominational differences.

“It has long been,” he says, “as well my wonder as my grief, to see such comparatively petty differences in judgement make such wide breaches and vast divisions in affection. It is strange that men should rather be quarrelling for a few trifling opinions, wherein they dissent, than to embrace one another for those many fundamental truths wherein they agree. For my own part, in some two or three and forty months that I spent in the very town of Geneva, as I never found that people discontented with their own Church government (the gallingness of whose yoke is the grand scarecrow that frights us here) so could I never observe in it any such transcendent excellency as could oblige me either to bolt Heaven against, or open Newgate for, all those that believe they may be saved under another....”

Evelyn, who knew Robert Boyle intimately for nearly forty years, was of opinion that he “held the same free thoughts,” in matters of religion and religious discipline, “which he had of Philosophy.” He practised Christianity “without noise, dispute, or determining.” He owned no master in religion but the Divine Author of it; and, what is more, he owned “no religion but primitive, no rule but Scripture, no law but right reason; for the rest allways conformable to the present settlement, without any sort of singularity.”

Only once is Robert Boyle known to have been persuaded to enter a conventicle. Curiosity led him, on one occasion, to Sir Henry Vane’s house, to hear the great man preach “in a large thronged room a long sermon.” The text was from Daniel xii. 2: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Looking, from a modern point of view, to the possibilities of such a text on the Resurrection, it is a little disappointing to learn that Mr. Boyle stood up at the end of Sir Henry Vane’s discourse and submitted, in his gentlest Oxford manner, that the preacher had suffered the meaning to “evaporate into Allegory.” Sir Henry Vane was at this time at the very height of his authority in the State; and Robert Boyle, telling the story to Sir Peter Pett, explained that Sir Henry’s congregation that day was composed of “dependants on him, and expectants from him,” who would never have dreamed of questioning his interpretations of Scripture, whatsoever they might have been. “But I,” said Boyle, “having no little awes of that kind upon me, thought myself bound to enter the lists with him as I did, that the sense of the Scriptures might not be depraved.”

According to Birch, Sir Henry Vane had the last word. He had recognised in his critic the celebrated Mr. Robert Boyle; and when Mr. Boyle sat down, Sir Henry assured him and the rest of his audience that he had only intended his remarks on the words of Daniel to be in the way of occasional reflections.

But there was another little congregation, which met in an upper room in Oxford; a room in the house of the obliging and universally curious Dr. Wilkins of Wadham. This was the weekly meeting of the Invisibles; the “learned Junto,” as Evelyn has dubbed them; a society which may be described as non-militant and non-party, and was certainly non-sectarian—the Oxford branch of the original Invisible or Philosophical College, begun in London in 1645, before Wilkins and Wallis and Goddard removed to Oxford. The Oxford branch kept up a regular correspondence with the London Society; and after a time, when Wilkins forsook Oxford for Cambridge, the weekly meetings of the Invisibles were transferred from Wadham to Robert Boyle’s own rooms.

And what a brilliant little “learned Junto” it was, in spite of the scrupulosities of the times! There was Wilkins himself, an Oxford man by birth, son of the Oxford goldsmith with the “very mechanicall hands” and a head that “ran much on perpetuall motion.” Wilkins was a man of about forty, “lustie, strong-groune, well-sett and broad-shouldered.” His manners were courteous, as became a man who had been Chaplain to Charles I’s nephew, the Prince Palatine, elder brother of Prince Rupert. A Parliament-man himself, Wilkins had taken the Covenant and the Wardenship of Wadham, and his Theological Degree. Under his tolerant rule, Wadham was flourishing, still patronised by some of the great “Malignant” families of England: Dr. Wilkins’s cheerful tolerance was greasing all wheels. And meanwhile the Warden himself was the life and spirit of the New Philosophy at Oxford—known, not only for his universal curiosity and irresistible manners, but as a writer of books. Had he not, as early as 1638, when still quite a young man, attempted to prove that the Moon might be a habitable world? And had he not, to a third edition, added the bold hypothesis, that the Moon might one day be reached “by volitation”? And in 1640 he had propounded in print the probability that this Earth itself was a planet. Clearly, the Warden was before his time; and many things besides the consciences of young cavalier-manhood were safe in his keeping.

And then there was Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, since 1649 Savilian Professor of Geometry. Wallis was about thirty-eight; a man of “moderate principles,” robust and energetic, with a serene temper that was “not easily ruffled,” but all the same a man who could hit out from the shoulder when he wanted to; as he did when he carried on his famous controversy with Dr. Hobbes. Wallis, as a believer in the New Philosophy, was to be among the first men to “maintain the circulation of the blood.” But the particular feat which had made Wallis’s fortune, some years before he went to Oxford, was a feat in “cryptologie.” In December 1642 he was private chaplain to a great family in London; and one evening at supper a cypher letter had arrived, which brought important political news. The Chaplain, in two hours, succeeded in deciphering it; and after that he seems to have become “cryptologist-in-chief” to the Parliamentarian Army: he is said to have had the deciphering of the King’s private correspondence taken at the battle of Naseby. He held successive City livings, was Secretary to the Westminster Assembly, and one of the founders of the Invisible Society. And in 1649—a married man, then—he went to Oxford as Savilian Professor of Geometry and one of the most vigorous of the “learned Junto.”

Dr. Goddard of Wood Street was another of them. He was a Deptford man, son of a ship-builder; in 1654 a man of about thirty-seven. He had been a student at Oxford, but had left it to study medicine abroad; and on his return he had taken his medical degrees at Cambridge. Since 1646 he had been in London, a Fellow of the College of Physicians, living in Wood Street, where he entertained the Invisibles and manufactured his arcana—the famous “Goddard’s drops” among them—in his own private laboratory. As Cromwell’s physician, he had been with Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns and in Cromwell’s severe illness in Edinburgh; and on his return with him to London, after the battle of Worcester, he had been appointed Warden of Merton.

And living just opposite to Merton College was the Oxford-bred Willis, with his strong royalist and episcopal sympathies, son-in-law of the stubborn old Dean of Christ Church and the lady who had been deposited in the quadrangle. Willis was a greater man in his own profession than the inventor of “Goddard’s drops.” A firm believer in the New Philosophy, he was to dissect many brains: a little bit of our cerebral geography is still known as the “Circle of Willis.” He is the man who discovered diabetes mellitus, and he may be called our first specialist in diseases of the nervous system.

These, with the “miracle of a youth” Christopher Wren, then Fellow of All Souls, and Seth Ward, the dangerously witty Savilian Professor of Astronomy, who lodged in the chamber over the gateway of Wadham, formed the “learned Junto” that welcomed Robert Boyle to Oxford. But the Librarian of the Bodleian, Dr. Barlow, must not be forgotten, though he was not an Invisible, and not at all in favour of the New Philosophy. Boyle, like many men of his time, was a student of divinity as well as of science; and he had come to Oxford partly, perhaps, on account of the Orientalists there. For he was studying Hebrew, Greek, Chaldee and Syriac, so as to be able to read the Scriptures for himself. He had learnt by himself, he says, “as much Greek and Hebrew as sufficed to read the Old and New Testaments,” merely that he might do so in the Hebrew and Greek, and thereby free himself from the necessity of relying on a translation. And “a Chaldee grammar I likewise took the pains of learning, to be able to understand that part of Daniel, and those few other portions of Scripture that were written in that tongue; and I have added a Syriac grammar purely to be able one day to read the divine discourses of our Saviour in His own language.” And he quotes the “known saying”—

“Though we stream waters not unpleasant think, Yet with more gusto of the Spring we drink.”

Accordingly the Orientalists in Oxford—men like Pococke, Hyde and Clarke—were to be among his new friends; but perhaps the most intimate of all was Dr. Barlow of the Bodleian. Barlow, logician and casuist, the man who saw both sides—to our modern ideas a bit of a trimmer—was yet “a man of prodigious learning and proportionall memory.” He knew exactly “what the fathers, schoolmen and casuists had said upon any question of divinity or case of conscience”; and with all his accomplishments, and in spite of his limitations, he was a delightful companion—“very communicative of his knowledge”—and Robert Boyle liked him.

One other man there was, a mere boy in 1654, but in a way, perhaps, the most notable of them all: a little deformed man, with a pale, sharp, clever face, and lank dark hair that hung about his eyes; a man with a stooping figure and a quick step; a queer little solitary man who ate little and slept less, and worked restlessly and incessantly; a man, even in those young days, of a melancholy, jealous temper, warped by ill-health. This was Robert Hooke, who had come to Oxford in 1653, when he was eighteen, as servitor or chorister of Christ Church. He was the sickly, gifted son of a country parson, and, too delicate to learn lessons, had used his little brain and fingers to make toy-ships that would sail, toy-guns that would go off, and toy-clocks that would go on. Then, for a time, he was with Dr. Busby at Westminster School; and at Christ Church his restless genius brought him to the notice of the Invisibles. Dr. Wilkins, with his pet dream of an excursion to the Moon, must have been pleased to find a young man who could work out “thirty ways of flying.” With Seth Ward’s help, Hooke studied mathematics and astronomy; and he worked for Willis in Willis’s own laboratory. It was Willis who recommended him to Boyle; and when Boyle set up a laboratory at Oxford, Hooke became Boyle’s personal assistant. “Boyle’s Law” and “Hooke’s Law” go together in the Handbooks of Physical Science. The air-pump, the Machina Boyleana, invented for his own purposes by Robert Boyle, was “perfected” for him by Hooke. “Mr. Hooke,” wrote Boyle in the Introduction to his Spring of the Air, “was with me when I had these things under consideration.” The years spent working for and with Robert Boyle were perhaps the happiest in Hooke’s life. His chatty letters to Boyle, after the two parted company and Hooke became Curator of the Royal Society, show real affection and trust. They begin “Ever honoured Sir,” and end “Your Honour’s most affectionate, most faithful, and most humble Servant.”

But these things were not the work of a day or a year. The air-pump was only the beginning, to enable its inventor to make a “just theory of the air.” By this he “demonstrated its elasticity” and “that property alone was a means to find out abundance more.” Boyle’s first publication, New Experiments, physico-mechanical, touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects, made for the most part in a new Pneumatical Engine, was printed at Oxford, 1660. The dedicatory letter to his nephew, the young Lord Dungarvan, is dated from Beaconsfield, December 20, 1659—where, in all probability, Boyle was spending Christmas with his friend Edmund Waller, the Poet, at his house, Hall Barn. The book was attacked by Franciscus Linus and by Hobbes; and Boyle answered his “objectors” in the Defence of the Doctrine touching the Spring and Weight of the Air, published 1662, answering more especially Franciscus Linus, as Dr. Wallis had taken Hobbes in hand.

Do people who are not scientifically employed ever realise the absorbing, baffling, fascinating work that goes on inside a chemical or a physical laboratory? The “painful patience in delays,” the “faithfulness in little things,” the flash of success, the hard wall of “negative result”? Who but the “Scepticall Chymist” himself understands the Spirit of his Research?

“But it is scarce one day (or hour in the day) or night,” wrote Hartlib to Boyle, in 1659, “but my soul is crying out—

“‘Phosphore! redde diem; quid gaudia nostra moraris. Phosphore! redde diem!’”

It was in this spirit that Robert Boyle worked in his Oxford laboratory, through the years of the Protectorate and on to the coming of Charles II. Slowly and laboriously, and very gently, careful not to offend those from whom he dissented, he amassed and examined evidences that were to break down the old mistaken notions of the Greek and mediæval philosophy, and to build up—a very little way, perhaps, but on a new and sure foundation—the mighty structure of physical and chemical science. Its golden keys were to be handed over to Isaac Newton and Dalton, and a long and brilliant line of workers in experimental science. What if Robert Boyle, in the seventeenth century, spoke of phosphorus as “nocte-luca” and of gaseous elasticity as “spring of the air?” Dr. Wilkins, of Wadham, was only then preparing his treatise on a Real Character. As early as 1647, Boyle himself, then only twenty, wrote to Hartlib: “If the design of the Real Character take effect, it will in good part make amends to mankind for what their pride lost them at the tower of Babel.” But even Dr. Wilkins’s Real Character would scarcely have been the vocabulary of to-day. Boyle’s Law, in whatever words he expressed it, remains incontrovertible. What if he just missed the discovery of Hydrogen after actually collecting it in a receiver? The oversights of science are the inevitable dear companions of research. What if, after giving to science the definition of an element, as distinguished from a mixture or compound, he could not go further, with the means then at hand, by suggesting any one substance as elementary? None the less, he had realised and stated a great natural fact, founding thereby a new era in science. The “Elements” of the Ancients, that had terrified him in childhood, were to be broken up; their secrets were to be extorted from them, for the good of mankind. There is an echo of the old Genevan thunderstorm, and the older Benedicite, in Boerhaave’s eulogium of Boyle—“to him we owe the secrets of fire, air, water, animals, vegetables and frosts”; but in modern times, and in modern terms, Robert Boyle has had his recognition—

“In the days of the early Greeks, the word ‘element’ was applied rather to denote a property of matter than one of its constituents. Thus, when a substance was said to contain fire, air, water, and earth (of which terms a childish game, doubtless once played by all of us, is a relic), it probably meant that they partook of the nature of the so-called elements. Inflammability showed the presence of concealed fire; the escape of ‘airs’ when some substances are heated or when vegetable or animal matter is distilled, no doubt led to the idea that these airs were imprisoned in the matters from which they escaped; and hardness and permanence were ascribed to the presence of earth, while liquidity and fusibility were properties conveyed by the presence of concealed water. At a later date the ‘Spagyrics’ added three ‘hypostatical principles’ to the quadrilateral; these were ‘salt,’ ‘sulphur,’ and ‘mercury.’ The first conveyed solubility, and fixedness in fire; the second, inflammability, and the third, the power which some substances manifest of producing a liquid, generally termed ‘phlegm,’ on application of heat, or of themselves being converted into the liquid state by fusion.

“It was Robert Boyle, in his Skeptical Chymist, who first controverted these ancient and medieval notions, and who gave to the word ‘element’ the meaning that it now possesses—the constituent of a compound.”

So the truths that Robert Boyle’s writings held forth have, in spite of opposition, established themselves, as he himself believed they would establish themselves, in the minds of men.