lo JOHN GOODYER 



It is likely that Goodjer found a distraction from 

 thouLrhts on the orrievous troubles of the times in his 

 botanical studies. During his early years the bitter strife 

 between Papists and Protestants reached an extreme in- 

 tensity, as first one and then the other of the conflicting 

 parties gained the ascendancy, but in all his multifarious 

 writings there is no note as to the side to which he be- 

 longed. It may be assumed that he shared the general 

 tendency of scientific men to take a ' philosophic ' view of 

 life, showing some disregard of the petty, transient events 

 which chiefly absorb the attention of mean minds. He 

 appears to have been a man who felt most at peace when 

 his thoughts were reposing on the larger and more enduring 

 aspects of the moral and material world. Yet all round 

 him was turmoil. In his own county he would have known 

 many who could have told lurid tales of the heavy blows 

 of the ' Hammer of Heretics '. As a young man he might 

 have seen one of the greatest Englishmen, the immortal 

 Raleigh, undergo trial, imprisonment, and execution, and 

 the Pilgrim Fathers driven abroad to seek that most 

 elemental of all liberties, the liberty of worship : they 

 sailed from Southampton in 1620. In the prime of life the 

 Civil Wars robbed him both of his best years for scientific 

 work, and of his great friend. Dr. T. Johnson, killed at 

 Basing House, to the great loss of natural science. 



There is always a danger in reading into fragmentary 

 documents more than was really meant, and yet there is 

 a great temptation to a Magdalen man to recall an incident 

 relating to a Magdalen College choir boy who became 

 a Bishop of Winchester and Visitor of the College. The 

 story gives one a vivid idea of the troubled state of 

 Hampshire in the boyhood of John Goodyer, and greatly 

 enhances the human interest attaching to his papers about 

 'pioneers'^ and about Vachell''^ and Uvedale." Thomas 

 Cooper, translated from Lincoln to Winchester in 1584, 

 was sorely troubled by the number of Romish recusants 

 ' p. 380. * p. 376. ^ p. 161. 



