66 STEPHEN HALES 



To return to Hales' birth : it is of interest to note how he 

 fits into the changing procession of lives, to see what great men 

 overlap his youth, who were his contemporaries in his maturity, 

 and who were appearing on the scientific stage as he was 

 leaving it. 



Sir Isaac Newton was the dominant figure in English science 

 while Hales was developing. He died in 1727, the year in 

 which Hales published his Vegetable Staticks, a book, which 

 like the Origin of Species, appeared when its author was 

 50 years of age ; Newton was at the zenith of his fame when 

 Hales was a little boy of 10 his Principia having been published 

 in 1687. And when Hales went up to Cambridge in 1696 he 

 must have seen the great man coming from his rooms 1 in the 

 N.E. corner of the Great Court of Trinity that corner where 

 Newton's and other more modern ghosts surely walk Macaulay 

 who used to read, pacing to and fro by the chapel 2 , and 

 Thackeray who, like his own Esmond, lived " near to the famous 

 Mr Newton's lodgings." In any case there can be no doubt 

 that the genius of Newton cast its light on Hales, as Sachs has 

 clearly pointed out (Hist. Bot., Eng. Tr., p. 477). Another great 

 man who influenced Hales was Robert Boyle, who was born 

 1627 and died 1691. John Mayow again, that brilliant son of 

 Oxford, whose premature death at 39 in 1679 was so heavy 

 a blow to science, belongs to the same school as Hales the 

 school which was within an ace of founding a rational chemistry, 

 but which was separated from the more obvious founders of that 

 science by the phlogiston-theory of Becchers and Stahl. I do 

 not find any evidence that Hales was influenced by the phlogistic 

 writers and this is comprehensible enough, if, as I think, he 

 belongs to the school of Mayow and Boyle. 



The later discoverers in chemistry are of the following dates, 

 Black 1728 1799, Cavendish 1731 1810, Priestley 1733 

 1804, Scheele 1742 1786, Lavoisier 1743, guillotined 1794. 



1 In 1699 Newton was made master of the Mint and appointed Whiston his 

 Deputy in the Lucasian Professorship, an office he finally resigned in 1703 (Brewster's 

 Life of Newton , 1831, p. 249). 



2 "There, if anywhere, his dear shade must linger," Trevelyan, Life and Letters 

 of Lord Macaulay, i volume edit. 1881, p. 55. 



