The shining light of the Thirteenth Century was Roger Bacon. His Opus Majus is “at once the Encyclopædia and the Novum Organum of the Thirteenth Century.” In this, besides other branches of scientific research, he devotes a rapid examination to questions of Climate, Hydrography, Geography, and Astrology. Scientific research, however, was out of date, and from the educated world Roger Bacon received small recognition. His writings earned only a prison from his own Order, and he died, in his own words, “unheard, forgotten, buried.”
The Revival of Learning, commonly known as the Period of the Renaissance, naturally entailed renewed interest in the sciences as well as the arts. Green gives a comprehensive view of it:
“The last royalist had only just laid down his arms when the little company who were at a later time to be known as the Royal Society gathered round Wilkins at Oxford. It is in this group of scientific observers that we catch the secret of the coming generation. From the vexed problems, political and religious, with which it had so long wrestled in vain, England turned at last to the physical world around it, to the observation of its phenomena, to the discovery of the laws which govern them. The pursuit of physical science became a passion; and its method of research, by observation, comparison, and experiment, transformed the older methods of inquiry in matters without its pale. In religion, in politics, in the study of man and of nature, not faith but reason, not tradition but inquiry, were to be the watchwords of the coming time. The dead-weight of the past was suddenly rolled away, and the new England heard at last and understood the call of Francis Bacon.
“Bacon had already called men with a trumpet-voice to such studies; but in England at least Bacon stood before his age. The beginnings of physical science were more slow and timid there than in any country of Europe. Only two discoveries of any real value came from English research before the Restoration; the first, Gilbert’s discovery of terrestrial magnetism in the close of Elizabeth’s reign; the next, the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, which was taught by Harvey in the reign of James. Apart from these illustrious names England took little share in the scientific movement of the continent; and her whole energies seemed to be whirled into the vortex of theology and politics by the Civil War. But the war had not reached its end when a little group of students were to be seen in London, men ‘inquisitive,’ says one of them, ‘into natural philosophy and other parts of human learning, and particularly of what hath been called the New Philosophy,... which from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated in Italy, France, Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in England.’ The strife of the time indeed aided in directing the minds of men to natural inquiries. ‘To have been always tossing about some theological question,’ says the first historian of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, ‘would have been to have made that their private diversion, the excess of which they disliked in the public. To have been eternally musing on civil business and the distresses of the country was too melancholy a reflection. It was nature alone which could pleasantly entertain them in that estate.’ Foremost in the group stood Doctors Wallis and Wilkins, whose removal to Oxford, which had just been reorganized by the Puritan Visitors, divided the little company into two societies. The Oxford society, which was the more important of the two, held its meetings at the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, who had become Warden of Wadham College, and added to the names of its members that of the eminent mathematician Dr. Ward, and that of the first of English economists, Sir William Petty. ‘Our business,’ Wallis tells us, ‘was (precluding matters of theology and state affairs) to discourse and consider of philosophical inquiries and such as related thereunto, as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Statics, Magnetics, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments: with the state of these studies, as then cultivated at home and abroad. We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the venæ lacteæ, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape of Saturn, the spots in the sun and its turning on its own axis, the inequalities and selenography of the moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes, the grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities, and Nature’s abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration therein, and divers other things of like nature.’
“The other little company of inquirers, who remained in London, was at last broken up by the troubles of the Second Protectorate; but it was revived at the Restoration by the return to London of the more eminent members of the Oxford group. Science suddenly became the fashion of the day. Charles was himself a fair chymist, and took a keen interest in the problems of navigation. The Duke of Buckingham varied his freaks of riming, drinking, and fiddling by fits of devotion to his laboratory. Poets like Dryden and Cowley, courtiers like Sir Robert Murray and Sir Kenelm Digby joined the scientific company to which in token of his sympathy with it the King gave the title of ‘The Royal Society.’ The curious glass toys called Prince Rupert’s drops recall the scientific inquiries which, with the study of etching, amused the old age of the great cavalry leader of the Civil War. Wits and fops crowded to the meetings of the new society. Statesmen like Lord Somers felt honored at being chosen its presidents. Its definite establishment marks the opening of a great age of scientific discovery in England. Almost every year of the half century which followed saw some step made to a wider and truer knowledge. Our first national observatory rose at Greenwich, and modern astronomy began with the long series of astronomical observations which immortalized the name of Flamsteed. His successor, Halley, undertook the investigation of the tides, of comets, and of terrestrial magnetism. Hooke improved the microscope, and gave a fresh impulse to microscopical research. Boyle made the air-pump a means of advancing the science of pneumatics, and became the founder of experimental chymistry. Wilkins pointed forward to the science of philology in his scheme of a universal language. Sydenham introduced a careful observation of nature and facts which changed the whole face of medicine. The physiological researches of Willis first threw light upon the structure of the brain. Woodward was the founder of mineralogy. In his edition of Willoughby’s Ornithology, and in his own History of Fishes, John Ray was the first to raise zoology to the rank of a science; and the first scientific classification of animals was attempted in his Synopsis of Quadrupeds. Modern botany began with his History of Plants, and the researches of an Oxford professor, Robert Morison; while Grew divided with Malpighi the credit of founding the study of vegetable physiology. But great as some of these names undoubtedly are, they are lost in the lustre of Isaac Newton. Newton was born at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day, in the memorable year which saw the outbreak of the Civil War. In the year of the Restoration he entered Cambridge, where the teaching of Isaac Barrow quickened his genius for mathematics, and where the method of Descartes had superseded the older modes of study. From the close of his Cambridge career his life became a series of great physical discoveries. At twenty-three he facilitated the calculation of planetary movements by his theory of Fluxions. The optical discoveries to which he was led by his experiments with the prism, and which he partly disclosed in the lectures which he delivered as mathematical professor at Cambridge, were embodied in the theory of light which he laid before the Royal Society on becoming a Fellow of it. His discovery of the law of gravitation had been made as early as 1666; but the erroneous estimate which was then generally received of the earth’s diameter prevented him from disclosing it for sixteen years; and it was not till the eve of the Revolution that the Principia revealed to the world his new theory of the Universe.”
Ever since the Fifteenth Century, when Copernicus revived the ancient theory of Pythagoras that the planets revolved around the sun (a theory left in an imperfect state and demonstrated later by Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others) astronomical research has progressed steadily. It must be remembered, however, that De Revolutionibus Orbium, which met with great opposition, contained nothing regarding the laws of motion, for these had not been as yet discovered, and Saturn marked the boundaries of the Solar System. Copernicus assigned the “fixed stars” to a sphere, as in Ptolemy’s heavens (see [page 331]).
The great Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, whose idea of the Solar System is represented on [page 343], was his opponent. Brahe, however, a devoted student, a man of wealth, the favorite of kings and princes, and the proud possessor of the Castle of Uraniberg (City of the Heavens), an observatory equipped with fine instruments and built for him by Frederick II, King of Denmark, on the island of Hueen, and after his death the protégé of Rudolph II at Benatek, near Prague, contributed greatly to the advancement of the science by means of his discoveries, computations, solar and lunar tables, and catalogue of stars. He, like Copernicus, placed the “fixed stars” in an outer sphere. His observations on the planets were made to prove the truth of his system. This mass of observations was used instead by Johann Kepler, who had been his assistant at the Benatek Observatory, to prove Copernicus’s theory. Of Kepler, the discoverer of the three famous laws, who gave a complete theory of solar eclipses, calculated the transits of Mercury and Venus, and made numerous discoveries in optics and general physics, Proctor says:
“Kepler was not merely an observer and calculator; he inquired with great diligence into the physical causes of every phenomenon, and made a near approach to the discovery of that great principle which maintains and regulates the planetary motions. He possessed some very sound and accurate notions of the nature of gravity, but unfortunately conceived it to diminish simply in proportion to the distance, although he had demonstrated that the intensity of light is reciprocally proportional to the surface over which it is spread, or inversely as the square of the distance from the luminous body.”