A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



in truth the builder of St. Paul's began life as a pro- 

 fessor of astronomy at Gresham College, and was the 

 immediate predecessor of Newton himself in the presi- 

 dential chair of the Royal Society. Now, at the very 

 close of the seventeenth century, Boyle is recently dead, 

 but Hooke, Wren, Halley, and Newton still survive: 

 some of them are scarcely past their prime. It is a 

 wonderful galaxy of stars of the first magnitude, and 

 even should no other such names come in after-time, 

 England's place among the scientific constellations is 

 secure. 



But now as we turn to the souvenirs of Cooke and 

 Wollaston and Davy the scene shifts by a hundred 

 years. We are standing now in the closing epoch of 

 the eighteenth century. These again are troublous 

 times. The great new colony in the West has just 

 broken off from the parent swarm. Now all Europe 

 is in turmoil. The French war-cloud casts its omi- 

 nous shadow everywhere. Even in England mutter- 

 ings of the French Revolution are not without an echo. 

 The spirit of war is in the air. And yet, as before, the 

 spirit of science also is in the air. The strain of the 

 political relations does not prevent a perpetual ex- 

 change of courtesy between scientific men and scien- 

 tific bodies of various nations. Davy's dictum that 

 "science knows no country" is perpetually exempli- 

 fied in practice. And at the Royal Society, to match 

 the great figures that were upon the scene a century 

 before, there are such men as the eccentric Cavendish, 

 the profound Wollaston, the marvellously versatile 

 Priestley, and the equally versatile and even keener- 

 visioned Rumford. Here, too, are Herschel, who is 



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