time; the refreshing river 



the followers of Paracelsus, such as Thomas Willis and Thomas 

 Dover, who did in the end succeed in introducing into the pharma- 

 copoeia such valuable drugs as antimony, mercury, alum, bismuth, 

 and other "chymical" remedies. Even in this latter part of his life 

 Needham was a storm-centre; of the drug controversy he wrote, 

 "Four champions were employed by the Colledge of Physicians to 

 write against this book; two died shortly afterwards, the third took 

 to drink, and the fourth asked my pardon publicly, confessing that 

 he was set on by the brotherhood of that confederacy!" 



What of the Restoration? It is often misunderstood. Though 

 accompanied by repressive measures, no doubt, against the William 

 Dells and the Needhams and Winstanleys, it was a restoration, not 

 of the absolute Stuart monarchy, but an instauration of something 

 very different, something that was soon to become, in so far as it 

 was not already, a constitutional government in which the King 

 would govern, if he governed at all, by the grace of the bourgeoisie 

 embodied in the power of the City of London. It was, in fact, a 

 compromise, or perhaps a dialectical synthesis arising out of the 

 former deadlock. When Monk called on old retired Fairfax at his 

 home in Yorkshire in 1660, "My Lord told him his mind, that there 

 was no peace or settlement to be expected in England, but by a free 

 Parliament and upon the old foundation of Monarchy." Though the 

 Parliament's dead may have turned in their graves to see a King at 

 Whitehall again, they need have had little anxiety. It was not what 

 they had expected, but it was quite different from what they had 

 destroyed. The English revolution had done what all successful social 

 revolutions do, it had gone two steps forward and only one step 

 back. The bourgeoisie was now in power. Hence the royal patronage 

 extended to the scientists in their labours, labours which, as almost 

 anyone could see, would be for "the improvement of trade and 

 husbandry." It was their own phrase. 



This close association of the early Royal Society with practical 

 industrial development has puzzled many later writers, but it is 

 now a well-known story, and has even had special books, such as 

 that of G. N. Clark,^ devoted to it. "The noise of mechanick imple- 

 ments," wrote Bishop Thomas Sprat,^ the Royal Society's first 

 historian, "resounds in Whitehall itself" It would not have done so 

 in a Caroline court. So, too, about the same time, science in education, 



^ Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford, 1937). 



^ History of the Royal Society (London, 1670, often reprinted, e.g. 1722). 



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