102 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



on glow-worms, see the report of Robert Boyle, February 15, 1672 ; 

 on speaking trumpets, see Phil. Trans. Jan. 27, 1672, a report by 

 Sir Samuel Moreland. It would seem, therefore, that Shadwell 

 had access to certain volumes of the Philosophical Transactions and 

 had " crammed up" for his comedy. As soon as it appeared, the 

 comedy itself would become a new and more easily accessible sec 

 ondary source for Shadwell's successors, just as the scientific facts 

 were warmed over and served diluted in the columns of the Athenian 

 Mercury. 



A second source of material was the books that were being writ 

 ten by the virtuosi. Sir Nicholas Gimcrack's wild claims of being 

 able to fly had its origin in a book by Dr. Wilkins, The Discoverer 

 of a New World; Or, a Discourse Tending to Prove that 'tis Prob 

 able there may be another Habitable World in the Moon, 1638. To 

 this was appended, says Anthony a Wood, a Discourse Concerning 

 the Possibility of a Passage to the World in the Moon. 132 "Watts 

 attached to this note of Wood's the following, "When at Wadham 

 College he (Wilkins) attempted to make the art of flying prac 

 ticable". Lord Worcester kept the idea alive by including in his 

 Century of Inventions (1655) this statement (77), "How to make 

 a Man to Fly ; which I have tried with a little Boy of ten years old 

 in a Barn, from one end to the other, on a Hay-Mow". 133 Ten 

 years later Robert Hooke wrote, "The way of flying in the air 

 seems principally impracticable, by reason of the want of strength 

 in humane Muscles; if therefore that could be supplied, it were, I 

 think, easier to make twenty contrivances to perform the office of 

 wings". 134 



When Valeria, in her eager search for truth, sacrificed her pet 

 pigeon on the altar of science in order to discover whether the popu 

 lar tradition that a pigeon and a dove have no gall was true or 

 false, she was taught so to do by Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar 

 Errors. He records that he tried the same experiment. 135 His 

 surgical practice may have given him greater skill in dissection, for 



132 Wood, Anthony a, Athen. Oxon. vol. Ill, col. 969. 



133 See also Milton's History of Britain, 1670, on Elmer, a Monk of Malmesbury, 

 Kennet's History of England, vol. I, 1706, Friar Bacon's Miracles of Art, Nature, etc., 

 1659. 



134 Hooke, Robert, Micrographia, Preface, p. 19. 



186 Browne, Sir Thomas, Vulgar Errors, vol. I, p. 317. 



