A Scientist.
Science was making a push for itself in these times. Newton had discovered the law of gravitation before Charles II. died; the King himself was no bad dabbler in chemistry.
Robert Boyle, the son of an Earl, and with all moneyed appliances to help him, was one of the early promoters and founders of the Royal Society I spoke of; a noticeable man every way in that epoch of the Ethereges and the Buckinghams and the Gwynnes—devoting his fortune to worthy works; estimable in private life; dignified and serene; tall in person and spare—wearing, like every other well-born Londoner, the curled, long-bottomed wig of France, and making sentences in exposition of his thought which were longer and stiffer than his wigs. I give you a sample. He is discussing the eye, and wants to say that it is wonderfully constructed; and this is the way he says it:
“To be told that an eye is the organ of sight, and that this is performed by that faculty of the mind which, from its function, is called visive, will give a man but a sorry account of the instruments and manner of vision itself, or of the knowledge of that Opificer who, as the Scripture speaks, formed the eye; and he that can take up with this easy theory of Vision, will not think it necessary to take the pains to dissect the eyes of animals, nor study the books of mathematicians to understand Vision; and accordingly will have but mean thoughts of the contrivance of the Organ, and the skill of the Artificer, in comparison of the ideas that will be suggested of both of them to him, that being profoundly skilled in anatomy and optics, by their help takes asunder the several coats, humors, muscles, of which that exquisite dioptrical instrument consists; and having separately considered the size, figure, consistence, texture, diaphaneity or opacity, situation, and connection of each of them, and their coaptation in the whole eye, shall discover, by the help of the laws of optics, how admirably this little organ is fitted to receive the incident beams of light and dispose them in the best manner possible for completing the lively representation of the almost infinitely various objects of sight.”
What do you think of that for a sentence? If the Fellows of the Royal Society wrote much in that way (and the Honorable Boyle did a good deal), is it any wonder that they should have an exaggerated respect for a man who could express himself in the short, straight fashion in which Samuel Pepys wrote his Diary?