538 ' THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



age was the home of Winstanley, who built the first Eddystone 

 lighthouse. If you kicked aside an old shoe, flung purposely in 

 your way, " up started a ghost before you. If you sat down in a 

 certain chair, a couple of gigantic arms would immediately clasp 

 you in." The house was a perfect knickknackatory, as the peo- 

 ple of that day would have said. The instant you seated yourself 

 in an arbor built in the garden near a canal you " were sent out 

 afloat into the middle of the canal, whence you could not escape 

 till this man of art and science wound you up to the arbor." 

 Evelyn gives an interesting account of the singular inventions 

 of " that most obliging and universally curious " Bishop Wilkins, 

 whose lodgings at Oxford he visited when the bishop was warden 

 of Wadham College. Dr. Wilkins had contrived a talking statue, 

 which was hollow, and connected with a tube through which a 

 man a long distance off spoke the words which seemed to be 

 uttered by the figure. With the assistance of that " prodigious 

 young scholar, Mr. Christopher Wren," he had filled a gallery 

 above his lodgings with a variety of shadows, dials, perspectives, 

 and many other artificial, mathematical, and magical curiosities ; 

 a way-wiser, a thermometer, a monstrous magnet, conic and other 

 sections, a balance on a demi-circle, marble curiously colored by 

 Wren, and other scientific toys and instruments. 



A favorite experiment in the seventeenth century was produc- 

 ing the apparition of a rose or other flower, and was called the 

 process of the Palingenesis. " Having burnt a flower, by calci- 

 nation, disengaged the salts from its ashes, deposited them in a 

 glass vial, a chemical mixture acted on it, till, in the fermenta- 

 tion, they assumed a bluish and a spectral hue. The dust, thus 

 excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive forms ; by sym- 

 pathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined 

 place, we see distinctly the stalks, the leaves, and the flower 

 arise ; it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from 

 its ashes. . . . This vegetable phoenix lies thus concealed in its 

 cold ashes till the presence of heat produces this resurrection." 

 When the ashes again cool it returns to death. " A corpse may 

 give out its shadowy re-animation when not too deeply buried in 

 the earth. Bodies corrupted in their graves have risen, particu- 

 larly the murdered ; for murderers are apt to bury their victims 

 in a slight and hasty manner." Another scientific theory, as well 

 as popular superstition, proved beyond peradventure by experi- 

 ment! 



Some members of the society were " impatient for romantic 



discoveries ; miracles were required, some were hinted at, while 



, others were promised." Of these wonders, Glanville, a man of 



acute and original intellect, who, though a firm believer in and 



defender of witchcraft, was yet somewhat skeptical in scientific 



