STEPHEN GRAY. 47! 



Grey Friars lads; and we may be quite sure, not without 

 their entire consent and approbation. 



There is no biographer to tell Gray's history, however 

 curtly. His memorial is hidden in the early volumes of 

 Philosophical Transactions 1 the annals of the Royal So- 

 ciety which are seldom read except through some one's 

 abridgments. He appears there first during the halt 

 period in 1720, and evidently with Boyle's experiments on 

 the feminine head-gear in mind, says that he has made 

 leather and parchment and paper and hair and feathers 

 and threads all electrical by rubbing them, so that it al- 

 most looks as if he had procured one of those towering 

 structures of millinery and, after dissecting it, had electri- 

 fied every bit of it in detail. Then he disappears for nine 

 years, and we do not know what he was doing in that in- 

 terval any more than before his sudden advent, although 

 it is said that in his early days he devoted much attention 

 to optics. When he returns to view in February, 1732, and 

 recounts his discoveries of the preceding three years, he 

 dates his letter to the Society from the Charterhouse, and 

 the presumption follows that the world has shown him its 

 seamy side, and that after fifty years of struggle, he wel- 

 comes the peaceful asylum and sober garb of the poor 

 brethren. But it would be altogether wrong to suppose 

 that he utters any note of repining. On the contrary, it 

 is evident that he is now in possession of facilities for do- 

 ing work in which he delights; and besides, he has two 

 good friends, one a well-to-do country gentleman, the 

 other resident in. London and a member of the Society; 

 and, better still, both cordially sympathetic in all his aims 

 and endeavors. He spends his summers with them, and 

 makes the house of one of them the scene of a great dis- 

 covery, and worthy of a commemorative tablet, if it could 

 be now identified, 



1 Gray's papers are as follows: Phil. Trans., 1720, vol. 31, p. 104; 1731, 

 vol. 37, p. 18; 1732, vol. 37, pp. 285, 397; 1735, vol. 39, pp. 16, 166; 1736, 

 vol. 39, p. 400. 



