548 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF ROBERT BOYLE. 



THE services of Robert Boyle to science are described in the 

 National Biography as " unique, notwithstanding occasional 

 failing on the side of credulousness " — a failing which Sir Henry 

 Ackland excuses as due rather to the age than to the person. 

 Boerhaave regarded Boyle as the father of experimental philoso- 

 phy, " the ornament of his age and country, who succeeded to the 

 genius and talent of the Chancellor of Verulam," and indulged 

 in somewhat extravagant eulogy of his work. 



Robert Boyle, the fourteenth child and seventh son of Rich- 

 ard Boyle, Earl of Cork and Orrery, was born at Lismore Castle, 

 Munster, Ireland, January 25, 1627, and died in London, Decem- 

 ber 30, 1691. He was put into the care of a country nurse, 

 with instructions to bring him up as she would one of her own 

 children, his father saying that he would avoid the excessive ten- 

 derness which parents were liable to exercise toward their own 

 children, guarding them as carefully from the sun and the rain 

 " as if they were butter or sugar." Although the nurse carried 

 out these instructions faithfully, her ward grew up of weak con- 

 stitution and subject to many infirmities. He learned to speak 

 Latin and French in his earliest years, but showed, as he advanced 

 in his studies, a more decided inclination toward the sciences. 

 When eight years old he was sent to Eton to school, leaving Ire- 

 land, according to Sir Henry W. Ackland's terse summary of his 

 life, " in a gale of wind, and when the coast was ' infested by the 

 Turkish Gallies ' ; but, after touching at ( Ilf ordcombe and Mine- 

 head/ he happily arrived at Bristol. He shortly afterwards went 

 to Eton, where (we are told) ( he lost much of that Latin that he 

 had got ; for he was so addicted to the more solid parts of knowl- 

 edge that he hated the study of bare words naturally/ " The col- 

 lege was then under the charge of his father's friend, Sir Henry 

 Wotton. After spending three years there, he was placed as a 

 private pupil with the rector of Stalbridge, in Dorsetshire. In 

 1638 he started on his travels, under the care of a "wise and 

 intelligent tutor," passing through Normandy to Paris, thence 

 to Lyons, and thence to Geneva, where he stayed twenty-one 

 months. In the autumn of 1641 he visited Switzerland and 

 Italy, to spend the winter in Florence, where, he himself wrote, 

 he " spent his spare hours in reading . . . the new paradoxes of 

 that great stargazer Galileo, whose ingenious books, perhaps 

 because they could not be so otherwise, were confuted by a decree 

 from Rome ; his Highness the Pope, it seems, presuming, and that 

 justly, that the infallibility of his chair extended equally to deter- 

 mine points in philosophy and religion, and loth to have the sta- 



