424 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



is that, what with chemistry and pneumatics, and especi- 

 ally theology, he had abundant work to exhaust his ener- 

 gies. If it were not plain that he took a genuine pleasure 

 in sermonizing, and often in evolving homilies concerning 

 the most trivial topics ("on the paring of a summer apple;" 

 "on drinking water out of the brim of his hat;" "on his 

 horse stumbling," savagely burlesqued by Dean Swift in 

 "Pious Meditations on a Broomstick"), we might be 

 tempted to regard such efforts as misdirected. But no 

 man, having contributed so much to the progress of his 

 age, ever satisfied himself with so harmless an amusement. 



Leave out Boyle's sermons, and the contents of his treat- 

 ises again and again suggest Faraday. The descriptions 

 of his experiments often have the same ladder-like quality. 

 To such investigations as he did devote himself he brought 

 a most untiring persistence. "Never," says Evelyn, who 

 had known him for forty years, "did stubborn Nature 

 come under his inquisition, but he extorted a confession 

 of all that lay in her most intimate recesses; and what he 

 did he as faithfully registered and frankly communicated." 

 "Glasses, pots, chemical and mathematical instruments, 

 books and bundles of papers did so fill and crowd his bed- 

 chamber, that there was just room for a few chairs a 

 small library, as learning more from men, real experiments 

 and in his laboratory, than from books," continues the 

 diarist. Some one who asked to inspect his library, he 

 conducted to a room where he was dissecting a calf. 



Among Americans, Boyle has especial claim to remem- 

 brance, for perhaps to him, more than to any one else, is 

 due the first implanting and encouragement of scientific 

 thought in the struggling colonies. He was the friend of 

 John Winthrop, who joined the Royal Society as a 

 founder, when he came to England in 1662 for the charter 

 of Connecticut. And Winthrop seems to have been our 

 first scientist. Bancroft says of him that he took delight in 

 "the study of nature according to Bacon," in which way 

 he studied Indian corn and told the Royal Society all 





