The tools of his future profession already attracted him. “A Scenographical Instrument, to survey at one Station” is followed by “A Perspective Box, to survey with it,” and there is a ring of Bacon and Wotton in the compendious phrase “New Designs tending to Strength, Convenience, and Beauty in Building.”
There is certainly no more rightly prophetic entry in the whole astonishing list.
“Several new Ways of graving and etching” gives a certain colour to the story—though it must be discredited—that Wren introduced mezzotint.
“New Ways of Intelligence, new Cyphers” marks his early attachment to an amusement which he shared with others of his day, though without the need to use the art to conceal roguish passages in what he wrote, as was the case with Pepys’ shorthand.
His later excursions into veterinary surgery and the transfusion of human blood are heralded by the memorandum “To purge or vomit, or alter the Mass by Injection into the Blood, by Plaisters, by various dressing a Fontanell.”
We have a glimpse of the experiments connected with the working out of “A Pavement harder, fairer, and cheaper than Marble,” as well as into the social side of these Wadham assemblies, through John Evelyn’s glasses.
On July 13, 1654, he was at Dr. Wilkins’, at Wadham, and saw:
“Variety of shadows, dyals, perspectives, and many other mathematical and magical curiosities, a way-wiser, a thermometer, a monstrous magnet, conic and other sections, a ballance on a demi-circle, most of them of his own and that prodigious young scholar Mr. Chr. Wren, who presented me with a piece of white marble, which he had stain’d with a lively red, very deepe, as beautiful as if it had been natural.”
Two days before Evelyn had visited after dinner “that miracle of a youth.” There is no need to fill out the Wadham catalogue of inventions: we can accept Evelyn’s valuation, and he never changed his mind.
But the list from which I have quoted does not complete the story of Wren’s early essays in the scientific field, essays, be it noted, which are overwhelmingly practical. Wren was a devotee not of pure but of applied science.