SIR KKNElvM DIGBY. 377 



Digby was adventurer, conspirator, naval commander, 

 and diplomatist. He rejoiced in probably one of the most 

 extensive collections of personal enemies ever gathered. 

 They included the Pope, the King, Parliament, afterwards 

 the Lord Protector, and so on through all sorts of people, 

 down to and including his wife's relations. The last ac- 

 cused him of murder. Nevertheless his manners were 

 charming. When Parliament locked him up, his co- 

 prisoners said that he turned the jail into "an abode of 

 delight." His natural winsomeness accounts for his suc- 

 cess in gaining the greatest beauty in Europe as his wife, 

 and in inducing the Queen Dowager of France to wheedle 

 Parliament into permitting him to retain his forfeited head. 



But his estates, such as they were, were confiscated, and 

 he went into exile in France, and there produced, in 1644, 

 a treatise on the nature of the soul, 1 intended, he says, for 

 the instruction of his son, in which he appropriated as 

 much of Descartes' theory of the magnet and the electric 

 as served his purposes, and presented it as his own. 



Digby was by no means without ability, as his career 

 amply proves. And in point of scientific attainments he 

 ranked high for his time. He was the first to observe the 

 importance of oxygen to plant life, and he was the first 

 Englishman to write of the magnet and the electrics in 

 the light of the knowledge gained from the continental 

 philosophers. If he had made his work completely a 

 compendium in English of the discoveries and theories of 

 the latter, as it was in part, he would have rendered a ser- 

 vice of great value. 



In place of Descartes' spirals coming from the heavens 

 and moving through the pores of the magnets, Digby sub- 

 stitutes atoms, caused to rise from the torrid zone of the 

 earth by the sun's heat, to be replaced by others borne on 

 the heavier air which flows to the equator from the poles. 



1 Digby: Two Treatises, in the one of which Tht Nature of Bodies; in 

 the other the Nature of Mail's Soule is looked into in way of discovery 

 of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules. Paris, 1644. 



