ROBERT BOYLE. 415 



effluvia. L/ater, in 1663, he rubs a diamond in the dark 

 "upon my clothes, as is usual for the exciting of amber, 

 wax, and other electrical bodies," when it did "manifestly 

 shine like rotten wood." 1 He believed, as we shall now 

 see, fully in the corporeal nature of the electric effluvium, 

 regarding it as a part of the substance of the electric, and 

 so material a thing that, as he averred, he could smell it. 

 ("Many electrical bodies may, by the very nostrils, be dis- 

 covered.") This seems to have been the first recognition 

 of the peculiar odor of ozone, long subsequently observed 

 by Van Marum, although the substance itself was not dis- 

 covered until 1840 by Schonbein. 



Boyle's conception of the nature of magnetic and elec- 

 tric attraction was by no means an arbitrary hypothesis 

 framed to meet some special physical conditions. Here he 

 differed from Cabaeus, Descartes, and even from Von 

 Guericke. He formulated the corpuscular or mechanical 

 philosophy, wherein he neither agreed with the Plenists, 

 as'Hobbes and the Cartesians were called, nor with the 

 older Vacuists, who denied the plenitude of the world. 

 His primary concepts were matter and motion matter, 

 apparently, in one primordial substance. By variously 

 determined motion, he believed matterto be divided into 

 parts of differing sizes and shapes, and set moving in dif- 

 ferent ways. N Natural bodies of several kinds, according 

 "to the plenty of the matter and the various compositions 

 and decompositions of the principles, are thus formed ; 

 and these, by virtue of their motion, rest, and other 

 mechanical affections which fit them to act on and suffer 

 from one another become endowed with several kinds of 

 qualities," which, acting on the senses, result in percep- 

 tions, and, on the soul, in sensations. The summing up 

 of his philosophy is in the following passage, which cer- 

 tainly, for its time, is wonderfully close to modern 

 thought: 



"I plead only for such philosophy as reaches but to 



1 Birch : The Life of the Hon. Robert Boyle. London, 1744. 



