But already, under Cromwell’s powerful lord-lieutenancy, and with Fleetwood as head of the Irish Government, the work of settlement and transplantation had been begun. It was in part, perhaps, the work of transplantation in Connaught—for Robert Boyle had lands there as well as in Munster—that called him to Ireland in 1652. He was back in London, on a flying visit, in the autumn of 1653, just between Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump and the sitting of the Barebones Parliament; when, in fact, “This House” was “to be let—now unfurnished.”[183]
But he was in Ireland again a month or two before Cromwell’s Protectorate was proclaimed in London, and living in Dublin through the winter of 1653-4. William Petty, his fellow-Invisible, was also there, and Benjamin Worsley, the old Army surgeon, a great friend of Hartlib and of the Boyle family. Petty had been appointed by Ireton physician-general to the Army, and was doing wonderful things in organisation, amongst other things saving the Government several hundreds a year in their drug department alone. Worsley, a delightful man in his way, full of the most astonishing scientific projects for the benefit of seventeenth-century science, had been appointed surveyor-general, to take in hand the land-survey necessary in the process of transplantation. In Petty’s opinion Worsley was a bit of a quack, whose “mountain-bellied conceptions” ended usually in “abortive mice”; and when Worsley began his survey Petty thought it could be better and quicker done, and said so. The Government backed Petty, in whom they had got hold of a man of extraordinary genius and energy; and while Worsley was kept on as surveyor-general, Petty was allowed to contract to do the work of land-survey in thirteen months, importing skilled labour and London-made instruments.[184] And meantime, Robert Boyle, under Petty’s guidance, was working quietly in an anatomical laboratory in Dublin. Petty, in his outspoken way, had written to Boyle while Boyle was on his flying visit to London in 1653. Petty and Robert Boyle’s own relations in Dublin were at this time a little anxious about Boyle’s health and spirits; and urged by the relatives, Petty had written in the character of physician and friend, offering Boyle some sound advice. He wrote to “dissuade” him from “some things which my lord of Cork, my lord of Broghill, and some others of your friends think prejudicial to you; one of which is your continual reading.” Too much reading, Petty thought, “weakens the brain,” which weakness “causeth defluxions” and these “hurt the lungs.” In Petty’s opinion Boyle, who knew so much already, could get but little advantage from the constant study of books. Warming with his subject, Petty adventures a little more advice.
“The next disease you labour under is your apprehension of many diseases, and a continual fear that you are always inclining, or falling into, one or other.” He reminds Boyle how “this is incident to all that begin the study of diseases”; how “inward causes” may produce “different outward signs,” and those “little rules of prognostication, found in our books, need not always be so religiously believed.” And even if people do fall ill, do they not also sometimes get well again? “Why may not a man as easily recover of a disease, without much care, as fall into it?” And then, to wind up with: “The last indictment that I lay against you is, practising upon yourself with medicaments (though specifics) not sufficiently tried by those that administer or advise them.”
Physician as he was, Petty did not put his faith in “medicaments”—witness his savings in the Army drug department. “There is a conceit current in the world,” he told Robert Boyle, “that a medicament may be physic and physician alike.” What a mistake!
“Recommendations of medicaments do not make them useful, but do only incite me to make them so by endeavouring experimentally to find out the virtues and application of them.” And it is a hard matter to discover their true virtues. “As I weep to consider,” says Petty, “so I dread to use them, without my utmost endeavour first employed to that purpose.”
It is a manly, outspoken letter, though it may have seemed a little caustic at the time. And it had its effect. Robert Boyle came back to Dublin to work, under Petty’s direction, at anatomical dissection—and possibly to read less. He was still ailing, still dejected, still longing to be back in London; but, “that I may not live wholly useless,” he wrote to Mr. Clodius, Hartlib’s doctor son-in-law in London, “or altogether a stranger in the study of Nature, since I want glasses and furnaces to make a chemical analysis of inanimate bodies, I am exercising myself in making anatomical dissections of living animals, wherein (being assisted by your father-in-law’s ingenious friend, Dr. Petty (our General’s Physician)) I have satisfied myself of the circulation of the blood and the (freshly discovered and hardly discoverable) receptaculi chyli, made by the confluence of the venæ lacteæ, and have seen (especially in the dissections of fishes) more of the variety and contrivances of Nature and the majesty and wisdom of her Author than all the books I ever read in my life could give me convincing notions of.” While he is kept a prisoner in Ireland, he says, he will be delighted if there is anything he can do to help Clodius in an anatomical way; if there is anything “wherein my knives may give you any satisfaction, I shall be very proud to employ them to so elevated an end.” Meantime he was doing as Clodius had asked him—looking into the “mineral advantages of Ireland.” But “in this illiterate country, I find all men so perfect strangers to matters of that nature, that my inquiries have been as fruitless as diligent.” He can hear nothing about antimony mines; “but for iron I may be able to give you a good account of it, and to bring you over of the ore, my eldest brother having upon his land an iron-work that now yields him a good revenue, and I having upon my own land an iron-mine, to which, before the wars, belonged a (since ruined) work, which I have thoughts of resetting up. I am likewise told (but how truly I know not yet) of a little silver-mine lying in some land of mine; and very lately in a place which belongs to a brother of mine they have found silver ore very rich, for, being tried, it is estimated (as he tells me that means to deal for it) at between thirty and forty pounds a ton; but whether or no this be a mine of proportionable value we do not yet know. I was yesterday with an officer of the Army who farms a silver-mine for the State, who hath promised me what assistance he can in my mineral inquiries, and told me that a metallist and refiner whom he extolled with superlative elogies assured him that there was no country in Europe so rich in mines as Ireland, had but the inhabitants the industry to seek them, and the skill to know them.”
But Robert Boyle was impatient to leave Ireland. “I live here in a barbarous country,” he told Clodius in this letter, “where chemical spirits are so misunderstood, and chemical instruments so unprocurable, that it is hard to have any hermetic thoughts in it and impossible to bring them to experiment.”
In the autumn of 1654 he was back in England. In the previous year, during his flying visit to London, he had talked with Dr. Wilkins, of Wadham, about Oxford, and had probably ridden down to Oxford to see what it was like. Stalbridge was all very well, but it was removed from the by-paths of intelligence; somehow, since his illnesses, there was a sadness over its orchards which Vulcan himself could not dispel. London was a fascinating labyrinth of interests, but in Oxford he believed he could “live to philosophy.” Oxford was to be his Athens. Thither, already, some of the Invisibles had migrated from London. For it was no longer the old Royalist Oxford, where the sunburnt boy with the bow and arrows had once thought of joining the King’s Army. It was Oxford six years after the Parliament’s Visitation and Purgation; Oxford after the imposition of the Covenant. The old Heads had conformed or been summarily ejected, the new Heads were Commonwealth men; and Cromwell himself was Chancellor. It was an Oxford where the use of the Liturgy was not openly permitted. And yet, “speech is thrall, but thocht is free,” says the old Scottish proverb. At Oxford a man could still fast quietly, if he was so minded, for forty-one hours, without being sent down for it.[185] At Oxford one might still study philosophy, and mathematics, and Oriental languages unimpeded. And there was the Bodleian. Oxford was indeed “the only place in England where, at that time, Mr. Boyle could have lived with much satisfaction to himself.”[186]