THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS OF NEWTON. 777 



THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS OF NEWTON. 



ii. 



EOBERT HOOKE was born at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, 

 July 18, 1635.- Like Newton, he was a sickly child, and, like 

 Newton too, his early years were distinguished and diverted by his 

 singular mechanical ingenuity. He has left it on record that, having 

 seen an old brass clock taken to pieces, he succeeded in constructing, 

 in imitation of it, a wooden one that would, after a fashion, go ; and 

 about the same period he rigged out a miniature ship with ropes, pul- 

 leys, and masts, besides a contrivance to make it fire off some small 

 guns while sailing across an adjacent haven ; with what childish ap- 

 plause and self-gratulation, we are left to imagine. Nor did his sole 

 gifts lie in this direction. His literary aptitude was beyond the com- 

 mon, and he showed a marked taste for music and painting. His edu- 

 cation was as various as his talents. His father, who was minister of 

 the parish, destined him for his own profession ; but his infirm health 

 precluded serious study, and it was consequently proposed to bind him 

 apprentice to a watchmaker, or some similarly skilled artisan. After 

 his father's death in 1648, his artistic tendencies so far got the upper 

 hand, that we hear of him in the workshop of Sir Peter Lely, where, 

 however, his occupation seems to have been nothing more aesthetic than 

 color-grinding. Either this preliminary stage of art disgusted him, or 

 (as his biographers prefer to state) the smell of oil-paint aggravated 

 his constitutional headaches, and he was transferred to the care of Dr. 

 Busby, the celebrated master of Westminster School, who kept him 

 gratuitously in his own house for several years. Here his education, 

 properly speaking, may be said to have begun. He not only acquired 

 a competent knowledge of Latin and Greek, with a tincture of Hebrew 

 and other Oriental languages, but is said to have astonished his teach- 

 ers by mastering the first six books of Euclid in as many days, and by 

 playing, without instruction, twenty lessons on the organ. In 1653 he 

 entered Christ Church, Oxford, as servitor to a Mr. Goodman ; and 

 ten years later received, on the nomination of Lord Clarendon, then 

 Chancellor of the University, the degree of Master of Arts, which his 

 poverty had perhaps prevented him from taking in the ordinary course. 

 In 1654 the Hon. Robert Boyle, having finished his travels in Italy 

 and his studies at Leyden, came to reside at Oxford. This amiable and 

 ingenious gentleman has been quaintly panegyrized by an Irish humor- 

 ist as " the father of chemistry and brother of the Earl of Cork." Al- 

 though the clauses of this eulogy command different degrees of assent, 

 and claim different kinds of esteem, they may be taken together as 

 roughly summarizing the merits of its subject in the popular apprehen- 

 sion of that time. He was infected to an extraordinary extent with 



