8 HER OES OF INVENTION AND DISCO VER Y. 



brated Sir William Petty, the ancestor of the Marquis ol 

 Lansdowne), who lodged, it seems, in the house of an apothe- 

 cary, whose store of drugs was found convenient for their 

 experiments. On Dr. Petty going to Ireland, they next met, 

 the narrative proceeds, "(though not so constantly) at the 

 lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, then warden of Wadham College; 

 and, after his removal to Trinity College, in Cambridge, at the 

 lodgings of the honourable Mr. Robert Boyle, then resident for 

 divers years in Oxford." Boyle, indeed, continued to reside 

 in this city till the year 1668. Meanwhile, in 1663, three 

 years after the Restoration, the members of the London club 

 were incorporated under the title of the Royal Society. 



It was during his residence at Oxford that Boyle made some 

 of the principal discoveries with which his name is connected 

 In particular, it was here that he prosecuted those experiments 

 upon the mechanical properties of the air, by which he first 

 made himself generally known to the public, and the results of 

 which rank among the most important of his contributions to 

 natural science. The first account which he published of these 

 experiments appeared at Oxford in 1660, under the title of 

 ** New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, touching the spring of 

 the air and its effects." The work is in the form of letters to 

 his nephew, Viscount Dungarvon, the son of the Earl of Cork, 

 which are dated in December, 1659. It may be not unnaturally 

 supposed that Boyle's attention was first directed to the subject 

 of Pneumatics, when he was engaged at Florence in making 

 himself acquainted with the discoveries of Galileo, whose 

 experiments first introduced anything hke science into that 

 department of inquiry. He states, himself, in his first letter to 

 his nephew, that he had some years before heard of a book, by 

 the Jesuit Schottus, giving an account of a contrivance, by which 



