“Though we stream waters not unpleasant think,
Yet with more gusto of the Spring we drink.”[199]
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”;[200] 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,[201] 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”[202] and “Hooke’s Law”[203] 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,[204] “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.”[205] 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.[206] 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!’”[207]