DOYLK, KOUKKT. 



BOTLK, KOGKR. 



of tfce 17th eeotmy, are two thing* ao different in kind, that to laugh 

 M both in one show* nothing but the ignorance of to* laugher. 



led beea for year* a director of the Kwt ladfe Company, and 

 letter of his in 1676 pres*ing upon tort bod; the duty of 

 j Christianity in to* Bart. He camed the Ootpels and the 

 i of the ApoctlM to bo translated into Malay, t hit own cort, by 

 Dr. Thomas Hyde ; and he premotod an IrUh version. He aleo rare 

 Unre reward to the translator of Grotiu* D Veritat*, 1 to., In to 

 Arable; and would hare OMB at the whole expense of a TnrkUh 

 Testament, had not the East India Company relieved him of a part. 

 In the year 1680 be was elected President of the Royal Society, a port 

 which he declined, ai appear* by a letter to Hooke (' Works' - P- 74), 

 from aerupl** of oooecienoe about the religion* test* and oaths required. 

 In 1688 he advertised the public that some of hia manuecripta had 

 been feet or stolen, and other, mutilated by accident; and in 1689, 

 finding hia health declining, he refined moat ririte, and eet himeelf to 

 repair the Ion. In that year, being still in a ort of expectation that 

 the alchemical project might succeed, he procured the repeal of the 

 atatate 6 Hen. IV. -against the multiplying of gold or silver;" and 

 what wa still more useful, the tame statute contains a provision that 

 "ao mine of copper, Ac., shall be adjudged a royal mine, although 

 gold or nilver may be extracted out of the same." In 1691 his com- 

 plainta began to aunme a more serious character. Lady Ranelagh 

 died on the 23rd of December, and he followed her on the 30th of the 

 am* month. He was buried at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Jan<iary 7, 

 IflW, and a funeral sermon was preached on the occasion by Dr. Bnrnet, 

 who had long been his friend, and to the expenses of whose ' History 

 of the Reformation ' he had largely contributed. 



Boyle was never married. He was tall, slender, and emaciated ; 

 rxoMwively abstemious in food, and somewhat oppressed by low spirits ; 

 hut at the same time of a copiousness of conversation and wit which 

 made Cowley and Davenant rank him in that respect among the first 

 men of his age. His benevolence both in action and sentiment distin- 

 guished him from others as much as his acquirements and experiments, 

 and that in an age when toleration was unknown. He constantly 

 refused a peerage, though the personal friend of three successive kings. 

 He was always a moderate adherent of the Church of Knglnnd ; nor 

 is it recorded that he ever attended any other place of worship, except 

 once when he went to hear Sir Henry Vane discourse at his own house, 

 on which occasion he entered into a discussion with the preacher. 

 Finally, he was a man of whom all spoke well. With such a character, 

 it i* not to be wondered at if his private virtues were made to reflect 

 a lustre upon his scientific exploits which the latter could not h;.ve 

 gained alone ; the more especially when it is considered that his con- 

 temporaries, who viewed him as he was and from their own position, 

 had a right to regard his genius as one which produced results of the 

 first order, which could be but another way of saying that it was of 

 the first order iUelt So indeed it has been understood : and we are 

 accustomed to talk of Bacon and Newton and Boyle together. The 

 merits of Boyle are indeed singular and almost unprecedented ; his 

 discoveries are in several eases of the highest utility ; but we do not 

 think the inference that they were the result of a reasoning power or 

 a distinctive sagacity of the highest kind, would be correct. Coming 

 after Bacon, feeling all the beauty of his methods, disgusted with the 

 spirit of system, and strong beyond his contemporaries in common 

 MBS, the aame view of life which made him indifferent to the political 

 and religious dispute* of his time, and content himself with the know- 

 ledge and practice of the thing* which they all agreed in, also regulated 

 his views of philosophy ; so that he began to investigate for himself, 

 on the simple principle of examining closely, and strictly relating what 

 he saw. In this respect his writings remind us strongly of those of 

 Roger Bacon : they are full of sensible views and experiments of his 

 own, and of absurdities derived from the relation of others. Ho leans 

 too much, for one of our day, to the attempt to discover the funda- 

 mental relations which touch close upon the primary qualities of matter, 

 instead of endeavouring to connect and classify whnt he had actually 

 observed. His discoveries do not show him to have that talent for 

 on and power of perceiving points of comparison, which is the 

 ii-li!iig attribute of the greatest discoverers. To take an 

 ) : in hi experiments " showing how to make flame stable and 

 ponderable,'' he find* that various substance* gain weight by being 

 heated. lie states it then as proved that "either flume, or the 

 analogous efflnxions of the fire, will be, what chemists would call, 

 oorporifled with metnU or minerals exposed naked to it* action ;" but 

 it never suggest* itself to him that the additional substance added to 

 the metal or mineral may be air, or n part of air. 



When a character has been overrated in any reopect, the discovery 

 of it i, usually attended by what the present age calls a re-n 



m of opinion swing* to the side opposite to that on which 

 it ha* been unduly brought out of ita position of equilibrium. And 

 this has born the oa*e with recent estimate* of tbe character of Boyle 

 a* a man of science. Perhaps it will be a fair method to take a foreign 

 i*tory of physio* (where national partiality is out of the question) 

 andtry the following jwint: What are those discoveries of the 

 Briton of the 17th crntury which would be thought worthy of record 

 by a Frenchman of the 19th T In the Hint. 1'htl. du Progres de la 

 Physique,' Paris, 1S10, by M. Libes, we find a chapter devottd to the 

 'n de la Physique eotre le* mains da Boyle/ and we are told 



that the air-pump in hi* hand* became a new machine that such 

 mnans ID the hand* of a man of genius multiply science, and that it i* 

 impossible to follow Boyle through hi* labour* without being aatouisbed 

 at the immensity of his resource* for tearing out tbe secret* of nature. 

 The discovery of the propagation of sound by the air (the more 

 creditable to Boyle that Otto von Guericke had been led astray a* to 

 the cause), of the absorbing power of the atmosphere, of the elastic 

 force and combustive power of (team, the approximation to the weight 

 of the air, tbe discovery of the ' reciprocal ' attraction of the electrified 

 and non-electrified body, are mentioned as addition* to tbe science. 

 There is a peculiar advantage consequent upon such a labourer a* 

 Boyle in the infancy of such a science as chemistry. Here are no 

 observed fact* of such common occurrence, and the phenomena of 

 which are so distinctly understood, that any theory receives something 

 like assent or dissent as soon a* it i* proponed. The science of 

 mechanics must have originally stood to chemistry much in the aame 

 relation as the object* of botany to those of mineralogy : the first 

 presenting themselves, the second to be sought for. The mine was to 

 be found as well as worked; and every one who sunk a shaft diminished 

 the labour of his successors by showing at least one place where it 

 w*s not In this point of view it is impossible to say to what degree 

 of obligation chemistry is to limit its acknowledgments to Boyle. 

 Searching every inlet which phenomena presented, trying the whole 

 material world in detail, and with a disposition to prise an error pre- 

 vented, as much as a truth discovered, it cannot be told how many 

 were led to that which does exist, by the previous warning of Boyle as 

 to that which does not. Perhaps had his genius been of a higher 

 order he would have made fewer experiments and better deductions ; 

 but as it was, he was admirably fitted for the task he undertook, and 

 no one can say that his works, the eldest progeny of the ' N 

 Orgrmuin,' were anything but a credit to the source wliem 

 sprung, or that their author is unworthy to occupy a high pi 

 our Pantheon, though not precisely on the grounds taken in many 

 biographies or popular treatises. 



The characteristics of Boyle as a theological writer are much the 

 same as those which appertain to him as a philosopher. He does not 

 enter at all into disputed articles of faith, and preserves a qui 

 argumentative tone throughout : but the very great prolixity which 

 he falls into renders him almost unreadable, lie was, as he informs 

 us in his youth, a writer of verses, and one fancy-piece in prose, ' The 

 Martyrdom of Theodora,' has been preserved, wherein his hero and 

 heroine make set speeches to each other, of a kind somewhat like 

 those in Cicero de Oratore, with n little dash of Amadis de Qaulc, 

 until the executioner relieves the reader. His 'Occasional Refler 

 have fallen under the lash of the two greatest satirists in our language, 

 Swift :ind Butler, in the ' Pious Meditation upon a Broomstick ' of the 

 former, and an ' Occasional Reflection on Dr. Charlton's feeling a dog's 

 pulse at Grcsham College,' published with the posthumous wr 

 of the latter. The treatises ' On Seraphic Love,' ' Considerations on 

 the Style of the Scriptures,' and ' On the great Veneration that Man's 

 Intellect owes to God,' have a place in the ' Index librorum prohibi- 

 torum" of the Roman Church. 



The ' Boylean Lectures ' were instituted by him in his last will, 

 and endowed with the proceeds of certain property, as a salary for a 

 "divine or preaching minister," on condition of preaching eight .- 

 in the year for proving the Christian religion against notorious inlidel*, 

 namely, atheists, theists, pagans, Jews, and Mohammedans, not d. 

 ing lower to any controversies that are among Christians themselves. 

 The minister it also required to promote the propagation of Christianity, 

 and answer the scruples of nil who apply to him. The stipend wag 

 made perpetual by Archbishop Tennison. Dr. Bentley was appointed 

 the first Boyle lecturer. We shall not give a detailed list of all the 

 titles of Boyle's works, which would occupy much room to little 

 purpose, aa a complete set of the original editions is very rare! 

 with, and tho two collected editions have their own indexes. During 

 his lifetime, in 1677, a very imperfect and incorrect edition was pub- 

 lished at Geneva. The first complete edition was published in i7i! 

 by Dr. Birch, aa already noticed. It is in five volumes foil 

 contains the life which has furnished all succeeding writers with 

 authorities, betides a very copious index. The oolli- i i-rs in 



tho fifth volume in highly interesting. The second com; 

 was published in 1772. But pn-viom-ly to either of these, Dr. Shaw, 

 the editor of Bacon, deserved well of the scientific world by publishing 

 mi i clition of Boyle in thr e volumes quarto, "abridged, methodised, 

 and disposed under general heads." As far as may be, the . 

 and scattered experiments are brought together, and a good index 

 added, but wo cannot find any references to the originals. Then is a 

 list of Boyle's works in Mutton's mathematical dictionary, and an 

 in Moreri. 



BOYLE, KOQER, fifth son and eleventh child of the first earl of 

 Cork, born April 26, 1621, was created Baron Broghill, almost w . 

 his infancy, by Diaries I. He married a sister of the Marl of .Suit Ik, 

 and landed with his wife in Ireland the day after the l>r. along out of 

 the rebellion, which he displayed grout activity in quelling. 



liMth of Charles 1., mid tho state of bin posses-ion* in Irrl m .1, 

 which h almost gave up a< lost, induced Boyle to seek retirement in 

 England, where he occupied himself with projects for the ret< 

 of royalty. He had gone so far as to obtain a passport, and was on 



