Curiosities of Science. 



in which we now possess it.* He is also the original discoverer 

 of that beautiful law, so fertile in valuable results, according 

 to which the elasticity of air varies as its density. And, in 

 the opinion of one of the most eminent modern naturalists, it 

 was Boyle who opened up those chemical inquiries which went 

 on accumulating until, a century later, they supplied the 

 means by which Lavoisier and his contemporaries fixed the 

 real basis of chemistry, and enabled it for the first time to 

 take its proper stand among those sciences that deal with the 

 external world. Buckle's History of Civilization, vol. i. 



SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S ROOMS AND LABORATORY IN TRINITY 

 COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 



Of the rooms occupied by Newton during his early resi- 

 dence at Cambridge, it is now difficult to settle the locality. 

 The chamber allotted to him as Fellow, in 1667, was " the 

 Spiritual Chamber," conjectured to have been the ground- 

 room, next the chapel, but it is not certain that he resided 

 there. The rooms in which he lived from 1682 till he left 

 Cambridge, are in the north-east corner of the great court, 

 on the first floor, on the right or north of the gateway or 



Principal entrance to the college. His laboratory, as Dr. 

 lumphrey Newton tell us, was " on the left end of the garden, 

 near the east end of the chapel ; and his telescope (refracting) 

 was five feet long, and placed at the head of the stairs, going 

 down into the garden. "f The east side of Newton's rooms has 

 been altered within the last fifty years : Professor Sedgwick, 

 who came up to college in 1804, recollects a wooden room, 

 supported on an arcade, shown in Loggan's view, in place of 

 which arcade is now a wooden wall and brick chimney. 



Dr. Humphrey Newton relates that in college Sir Isaac very rarely 

 went to bed till two or three o'clock in the morning', sometimes not till 

 five or six, especially at spring and fall of the leaf, when he used to 

 employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire scarcely going out 

 either night or day ; he sitting up one night, and Humphrey another, 

 till he had finished his chemical experiments. Dr. Newton describes 

 the laboratory as " well furnished with chymical materials, as bodyes, 

 receivers, heads, crucibles, &c., which was made very little use of, ye 

 crucibles excepted, in which he fused his metals : he would some- 

 times, though very seldom, look into an old mouldy book, which lay in 

 his laboratory ; I think it was titled Agricola de Metallis, the trans- 

 muting of metals being his chief design, for which purpose antimony 



* Dr Whewell (Bridgewater Treatise, p. 266) well observes, that Boyle and 

 Pascal are to hydrbstatics what Galileo is to mechanics, and Copernicus, Kepler, 

 and Newton are to astronomy. 



t The Kev. Mr. Tumor recollects that Mr Jones, the tutor, mentioned, in one 

 of his lectures on optics, that the reflecting telescope belonging to Newton was 

 then lodged in the observatory over the gateway; and Mr. Turner thinks that 

 he once saw it, with a finder affixed to it. 



