Mr. Boyle, Mr. Boyle’s air-pump, and Mr. Boyle’s books—especially that on the Spring and Weight of the Air—were the talk of the Court as well as of the College. It is quite true that “the weighing of ayre” was, in those early days of the Society’s existence, its favourite occupation. A great change had come over the Philosophers. They found themselves invited into a kind of scientific Kindergarten, where knowledge was to be gained, not through their old black-letter books, but out of pots and pans and pendulums, and shining ores, and precious stones, and “anatomes” and “curiosities” and “things of nature.” And the most fascinating thing of nature at this moment—just because, perhaps, it was intangible, invisible, elusive—was “the ayre.” These men had discovered that “the ayre” possessed properties, obeyed laws; in fact, they had suddenly realized that they were all going about under an atmosphere. Mr. Boyle had shown it to be so; and there, in their midst, was the machina Boyleana.
But there were other “transactions” of the infant Royal Society. In Oldenburg’s letters, and Hooke’s letters, and in the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, there are vivid contemporary glimpses of what went on at Gresham College. Poor old Hartlib was dead, and Oldenburg seems to have taken Hartlib’s place as Boyle’s London Correspondent. He gave Boyle the latest gossip, not only of “Our Society,” but of “State affairs” at home and abroad. From him Boyle, at Oxford, heard of the visits of distinguished foreigners—Huygens, Sorbière, and others—to Gresham College. Even when the attendances were “thin,” and there was not much being shown, these men were struck with admiration of “our experimental method,” our “sedate and friendly way of conference,” and “the gravity and majestickness of our order.”
The indefatigable Secretary, overworked and underpaid as he undoubtedly was, and asking in vain for an “amanuensis,” had soon put himself in touch with experimentalists in France, Holland, Germany, Italy, the Bermudas, Poland, Sweden, New England, and the East Indies. A new governor of “Bombaia” had offered his services to the Society “for philosophical purposes”: “We have taken to taske the whole universe,” wrote Oldenburg to Governor Winthrop in Connecticut.
There was really no form of “curiosity” of earth, or sea, or sky, that was not grist to the Gresham College mill. Chariots and watches, masonry, ores, “the nature of salts,” injection into the veins and the transfusion of blood, the velocity of bullets, mine-damp, musical sounds and instruments, thermometers and barometers, fossils, shooting stars, and double keels were all mixed up in most admired disorder; and Mr. Boyle at Oxford was doing his best to interest the “Oxonians” in the work going on at Gresham College; he himself being equally interested in the experiments of transfusion of blood carried on in London and the “musical experiments” made under his direction in the Oxford colleges. Oldenburg reported everything to him, and Hooke, too, his old assistant, who was now curator of Our Society. Winthrop had written about the ores to be found in New England, and an enthusiastic young Londoner had been planting a “Virginian garden.” At one meeting of the Society there had been “a good store of discourse concerning star-shoots”; at another all the experiments were of “the descent of bodies in water.” On more than one occasion a party of the philosophers—Sir Robert Moray, Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Goddard, Hooke, and others—had climbed to the top of the steeple of St. Paul’s “to make the ‘Torricellian experiments’ of falling bodies and of pendulums.” And after the Correspondence Committee had met at Mr. Povy’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for the purpose of collecting evidence from “all parts of the world,” Oldenburg wrote to Boyle: “This was our entertainment above ground, I leave you to guess what our correspondence was underground in the grotto, and near the well, that is the conservatory of so many dozen of wine-bottles of all kinds.”[281]
So the letters came and went between London and Oxford; and Boyle’s manuscripts and proof-sheets were sent to Oldenburg by coach or carrier, or by Boyle’s own servant. “These coachmen and carriers are incorrigible,” wrote Oldenburg, when parcels were charged double and letters went astray; and there was, in particular, a “she-porter” who specially annoyed Mr. Oldenburg. Presently, Mr. Sprat was writing the Society’s history—as far as it went; and Samuel Butler was satirising Gresham College up and down the town. Everybody knew that the King kept a copy of Hudibras in his pocket: might not the young Society suffer from Butler’s sarcasm? The Secretary was ruffled and anxious; and he owned to Boyle that he could have done a good deal more in pushing and popularising certain investigations for the Society “if I had not been afraid of Hudibras.”[282]
But while Hudibras was ridiculing the experimentalists, and Restoration-orthodoxy was shaking its head over the new philosophy, the Society had its votaries—a good many of them, it is true, on the other side of the channel.[283] If Butler made fun of the Philosophers—
“Their learned speculations,
And all their constant occupations
To measure and to weigh the air
And turn a circle to a square”[284]—