102 THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



1610. It was proposed to place Gresham College, 

 the Savoy, or Winchester College, at the disposition 

 of the pan sophists. Comenius thought that nothing 

 was more certain than that the design of the great 

 Verulam concerning the opening somewhere of a 

 universal college, devoted to the advancement of the 

 sciences, could be carried out. The impending strug- 

 gle, however, between Charles I and the Parliament 

 prevented the attempt to realize the pansophic 

 dream, and the Austrian Slav, who knew something 

 of the horrors of civil war, withdrew, discouraged, 

 to the Continent. 



Nevertheless, Hartlib did not abandon the cause, 

 but in 1644 broached Milton on the subject of edu- 

 cational reform, and drew from him the brief but 

 influential tract on Education. In this its author 

 alludes rather slightingly to Comenius, who had some- 

 thing of Bacon's infelicity in choice of titles and epi- 

 thets and who must have seemed outlandish to the 

 author of Lycidas and Oomus. But Milton joined 

 in the criticism of the universities the study of 

 words rather than things and advocated an ency- 

 clopedic education based on the Greek and Latin 

 writers of a practical and scientific tendency (Aris- 

 totle, Theophrastus, Cato, Varro, Vitruvius, Seneca, 

 and others). He outlined a plan for the establish- 

 ment of an institution to be known by the classical 

 (and Shakespearian) name " Academy " a plan 

 destined to have a great effect on education in the 

 direction indicated by the friends of pansophia. 



In this same year Robert Boyle, then an eager 

 student of eighteen just returned to England from 

 residence abroad, came under the influence of the 



