544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



society, where even your very fragments are enough to enrich 

 any man that has the honour to approach you." He calls heaven 

 the Royal Society above, " where those whose refined and excel- 

 lent natures make them capable of the sublimest mysteries, and 

 aspire after experimental knowledge, truly so called, shall be 

 fiird ; and there without danger taste of the fruit of the tree 

 which cost our unhappy parents so dear, shall meet with no pro- 

 hibition of what is desirable, no serpent to deceive, none to be 

 deceived." 



Many of the members of the Royal Society, while distinguished 

 for their patient industry, could not philosophize on the facts 

 they had collected, and their grammar and literary style were 

 open to criticism. Their published works were consequently ridi- 

 culed by their ever- watchful opponents. One chief victim of the 

 wits was Sir Hans Sloane, noted, like Ashmole, for his museum. 

 The brilliant Dr. King produced a parody or travesty on Sloane's 

 valuable history of Jamaica (quoting verbatim his bulls and blun- 

 ders), which is " one of the severest and merriest satires that was 

 ever written in prose." Yet we find the society, as early as 1665, 

 appointing a committee to consider the improvement of the Eng- 

 lish language. And in Evelyn's correspondence appears a long 

 letter addressed to Sir Peter Wyche, Knt., chairman of the com- 

 mittee, in which he says that they ought to prepare manuals of 

 grammar, orthography, and punctuation, and a lexicon of current, 

 obsolete, and technical words. Out of this grew a project for the 

 establishment of an institution similar to the French Academy. 

 "And, indeed," writes Evelyn to Pepys, in 1689, "such was once 

 designed since the Restauration of Charles II (1665), and in order 

 to it three or four meetings were begun at Gray's Inn by Mr. 

 Cowley, Dr. Spratt, Mr. Waller, the Duke of Buckingham, Matt 

 Clifford, Mr. Dryden, and some other promoters of it. But by 

 the death of the incomparable Mr. Cowley, distance and incon- 

 venience of the place, the contagion and other circumstances in- 

 tervening, it crumbled away and came to nothing ; what straw I 

 had gathered towards the bricks of that intended pyramid (hav- 

 ing the honor to be admitted an inferior laborer) you may com- 

 mand and dispose of, if you can suffer my impertinences ; and that 

 which I have not shew'd you, the plan I drew and was laying 

 before them for that designe, which was, I say'd, the polishing of 

 the English tongue, and to be one of the first intentions and chief- 

 est subjects of the Academists." 



The mental act of associating colors with words, etc., was observed in 1848 

 by Thoreau, who wrote to Emerson that his Ellen said that she could tell the 

 color of a great many words, and amused the children at school by so doing. 



