Robert Boyle

by Flora Masson

And even in these experiments, one pair of eyes, at least, was fixed upon Robert Boyle; eyes that saw as far as, and perhaps a little further than, even Boyle’s. Isaac Newton—the boy who had jumped against the wind in that terrific storm that raged over England when Cromwell lay dying—was only twenty-nine in 1671; but he was already professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. It was six years since he had noticed the traditional apple fall to earth in his mother’s orchard in Lincolnshire. He himself had been tempted to seek after the philosopher’s stone; and when in 1676 Isaac Newton read in the Transactions of Boyle’s “uncommon experiment about the incalescence of gold and mercury,” it was in the finest spirit, as one of Boyle’s sincerest “honourers,” that Newton wrote to Oldenburg, the secretary. He felt that “the fingers of many will itch to have the knowledge of the preparation of such a mercury; and for that end some may not be wanting to move for the publishing of it, by urging the good it may do in the world. But, in my simple judgment, the noble author, since he has thought fit to reveal himself so far, does prudently in being reserved in the rest.” Newton gave his reasons for doubting this theory of the transmutation of metals: he foreshadowed the “immense damage to the world” that might come from proceeding further with it. “I question not,” he says of Boyle’s experiments, “but that the great wisdom of the noble author will sway him to silence till he shall be resolved of what consequence they may be.” It was because Boyle himself seemed “desirous of the sense of others in this point” that Newton had “been so free as to shoot my bolt.”

Isaac Newton’s “bolt” took effect, though it must have cost Boyle something to give up that little bit of research; for he had been, so to speak, rolling a little ball of quicksilver and gold-dust in the palm of his hand ever since the year 1652, when he was only five-and-twenty; pressing it a little with the fingers of the other hand, till it grew “sensibly and considerably hot,” and timing the “incalescence” by a minute clock. He was to hover about the subject for a time, but in the end, he was to follow Newton’s advice. If these two men could be present at a meeting of the Royal Society in Burlington House to-day! Their two portraits are on its walls. Their two faces look down on modern experimental science. Their self-restraint has had its reward.

Already, in 1670, Boyle was at the height of his literary and scientific popularity, the acknowledged chief of the circle of New Philosophers in London. He had long been a valetudinary, saving his strength for his work, and holding himself aloof from uncongenial company. And he was now beginning to enjoy the ease and dignity of home life, a clever woman’s ministrations and companionship, and the thousand-and-one little amenities of a home that his bachelor life in his Oxford lodgings must have lacked. But in June 1670 he had been taken suddenly ill; “a severe paralytic distemper”, it was called; and eleven months later, in May 1671, he was writing a pathetic little letter to his old Dorsetshire friend, John Mallet of Poynington, describing in his own gentle words his invalid condition. “I have taken so many medicines,” he wrote, “and found the relief they awarded me so very slow, that it is not easy for me to tell you what I found most good by. The things which to me seem fittest to be mentioned on this occasion are that cordial medicines, especially such as peculiarly befriend the genus nervosum, were very frequently and not unsuccessfully administered ... that the dried flesh of vipers seemed to be one of the usefullest cordials I took; but then I persevered in taking it daily for a great while. That I seldom missed a day without taking the air, at least once, and that even when I was at the weakest, and was fain to be carried in men’s arms from my chair into the coach. That the best thing I found to strengthen my feet and legs, and which I still use, was sack turned to a brine with sea-salt and well rubbed upon the parts every morning and night with a warm hand....”

Boyle’s own doctor was Edmund King—not then Sir Edmund and the King’s Physician, but a London practitioner of repute, living in Hatton Gardens; a year or two younger than Boyle; a member of the Royal Society; a friend of Willis and Petty, and a great man for dissections and experiments. It was Edmund King who was so interested in the first transfusion experiments on human subjects, and who, “with my best microscope,” noticed the appearance of living organisms in “things left in water.” And it is to be remembered that in a list of Boyle’s lost manuscripts there is one with the title “Spontaneous Generation.” It is possible that he and Dr. King may have been working together with the microscope. The “viper powder” was one of Dr. King’s prescriptions, though he is said to have preferred the “volatile salt.” It was not till some years later that Dr. King gained such celebrity by his prompt action in bleeding Charles II after his apoplectic seizure. He had a lancet in his pocket; and no other doctor was at hand.

Boyle recovered from his paralytic distemper, though very slowly. Whether it was the cordial of viper’s flesh, or the ministration of a warm human hand, he did regain strength, and was able once more to take up his work and resume his London life—always afterwards more or less the life of a studious invalid. “It has plainely astonish’d me,” says Evelyn, “to have seene him so often recover, when he has not been able to move, or bring his hand to his mouth: and indeede the contexture of his body, during the best of his health, appear’d to me so delicate, that I have frequently compar’d him to a chrystal or Venice glasse which, tho’ wrought never so thin and fine, being carefully set up, would outlive the harder metals of daily use: And he was with all as clear and candid: not a blemish or spot to tarnish his reputation.”

The mere number of Boyle’s publications during these years is remarkable, even though much of the work for them had been done before, and had only to be arranged for publication. They dealt with the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy; the Origin and Virtue of Gems; Fire, Flame, and Effluviums; the Pressure of Solids and Fluids, and the Weighing of Water; the Properties of Sea Water, and its Distillation; the Mechanical Causes of Heat and Cold, Volatility and Precipitation and Corrosiveness; the Production of Tastes; the Hypothesis of Alkali and Acidum, and the effects of atmospheric conditions “even on men’s sickness and health.” And there was always the other facet to Boyle’s intellectual nature. While he was writing of all these and other things, while he was wrapped up in Suspicions—about the hidden qualities of air, celestial magnets and attraction by suction, statical hygroscopes, laudanum, and air-bladders, and “quicksilver turning hot with gold,”—he was also deep in meditations of the “Excellence of Theology compared with Natural Philosophy.” Both had always seemed to him to be the “Objects of Men’s Study.” He held tenaciously to the “Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion”; and his theological treatises were to run parallel with his philosophical transactions.

The later chapters of biography are of necessity a chronicle of losses. The death of the great admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, at the battle of Solebay, on May 28, 1672, removed the other splendid father-in-law of the Burlington family. His funeral, “by water to Westminster, in solemn pomp,” must have affected the inmates of the house in Pall Mall as well as the families in the two Piccadilly palaces. “They will not have me live,” Lord Sandwich had said sadly to Evelyn, before he sailed. It is very certain that the whole trend of politics at this time—the crypto-catholic movement, burrowing its way into Protestant England; the capuchins flitting about between Whitehall and St. James’s; the alliance with the French against the Dutch, and the prolonged war with Holland; the plottings and placings of the Cabal, and the quarrels and changes in the royal harem, which had pushed up to the very door of the house in Pall Mall—must have been utterly distasteful to Robert Boyle and his passionately Puritan sister.

Poor Charles Rich, my Lord of Warwick, who had been ill for a long time, died at Leeze in 1673, leaving Mary, a childless great lady, still surrounded by chaplains, to administer her husband’s property and to see all the three “sweet young ladies,” her nieces, married to satisfactory husbands of her own choosing.

A more personal loss to Robert Boyle was the sudden death of Henry Oldenburg in September 1677. He and another old friend, Dr. Worsley of the “mountain-bellied conceptions” for the good of mankind, died almost at the same time. Oldenburg had worked hard for the Royal Society since he came out of the Tower in the autumn of 1667. He had carried the Society through the troublesome time that followed the Fire of London, after the loss of its Transactions and during its sojourn in Arundel House. He had seen it reinstated in Gresham College, and a great collation given in its honour by the Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London. He had been overworked and underpaid, and had added to the small gains he made out of the Society’s Transactions[328] by doing a good deal of work for Boyle personally, in proof-correcting and in translating Boyle’s books into Latin. And Boyle had tried to obtain for him the Latin Secretaryship—the very post that Milton had held—but in this he had failed. One of the last glimpses of Oldenburg and Boyle together is at a little scientific supper-party in February 1676, given by Sir Joseph Williamson, who later became President of the Royal Society when Lord Brouncker resigned. Boyle was well enough to be at this supper-party; and Evelyn and Wren and Petty and one or two others were there, and “our Secretary, Mr. Oldenburg.”[329] Lady Ranelagh was away from home on a visit when the news of Oldenburg’s death reached her; and, knowing how much her brother would feel his death, she wrote Boyle one of her most comfortable letters, and made arrangements to return home at once.[330] And as Oldenburg had died without making a will, and his wife (his second wife, daughter of John Durie) died just before or just after him, Robert Boyle himself took care of their children, left poorly provided for and without relations in this country. The boy had been named “Rupert,” after the scientific Prince.