414 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



was by all odds the most able man in it its leading 

 spirit; and, at the time of its establishment, easily the 

 most eminent experimental philosopher in the land for 

 Bacon was dead and Newton yet a u sober, silent thinking 

 lad." 



In the year 1658, Caspar Schott, 1 a German Jesuit and a 

 pupil of Kircher, published a voluminous treatise on 

 Universal Magic, in which he described, for the first time, 

 von Guericke's air-pump and discovery of the weight of 

 the air facts which he had learned from von Guericke 

 himself. Schott's work came into Boyle's hands, and he 

 at once saw something which von Guericke apparently 

 had overlooked namely, that important results should 

 follow the study of rarefied air. Thereupon, with the 

 assistance of Robert Hooke, he devised a new and more 

 effective form of air-pump and demonstrated the elasticity 

 or spring of the air, and the law of the relation between 

 gas volume and pressure, which has ever since borne his 

 name. He was the first scientific chemist 2 the first to 

 teach that chemistry was independent of other arts and 

 not a mere adjunct; and the publication of his Skeptical 

 Chemist, in 1661, marked the overthrow of both the 

 Aristotelian and the Paracelsan doctrines of the elements. 

 With him began the new era in scientific research, when 

 its highest aim became the simple advancement of natural 

 knowledge. 3 



In Boyle's treatise 4 touching the spring of the air (i659\ 

 we find him experimenting upon the lodestone and observ- 

 ing that a vacuum does not prevent the passage of its 



1 Schott: Mag'ae Universalis, Naturae et Artis, Pars III. et IV. Her- 

 bipolis. 1658. 



2 And the object of Sir Boyle Roche's famous Hibernicism "The father 

 of modern chemistry and cousin to the Earl of Cork! " 



3 Roscoe & Schorlemmer : Treatise on Chemistry. New York, 1883, 

 i., 10. 



4 See The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, London, 1744- 

 Edited by Thomas Birch. 



