ROBERT BOYLE. 



CHAPTER I. 



Earls Career, 



" 'Twere a concealment 



Worse than theft, no less than a traducement, 

 To hide your doings ; and to silence that 

 Which, to the spire and top of praises, vouched, 

 Would seem but modest." Coriolanus. 



~T~ OOKING back over a period of fifty years, we are 

 * bewildered by the magnitude, the rapid changes, 

 the onward rush, of modern progress. When poor Henry 

 Thomas Buckle sat down to write the " History of Civil- 

 isation," he must have had a stout heart to face the gigantic 

 proportions of his task. His brain and hand were still and 

 cold ere he had finished the introduction to his stupendous 

 theme, and yet he had filled a ponderous volume. But the 

 difficulties which he encountered in recording the earlier 

 events of our social, political, and material advancement were 

 trifles in comparison with the complicated details of develop- 

 ment, the accumulated results of inventive genius, scientific 



