6 Things not generally Known. 



only to the good impulses of humanity. Isaac Newton's tele- 

 scope at the Royal Society of London ; Otto Guericke's air- 

 pump in the Library at Berlin ; James Watt's repaired New- 

 comen steam-engine in the Natural-Philosophy class-room of 

 the College at Glasgow ; Fahrenheit's thermometer in the cor- 

 responding class-room of the University of Edinburgh ; Sir H. 

 Davy's great voltaic battery at the Royal Institution, London, 

 and his safety-lamp at the Royal Society ; Joseph Black's 

 pneumatic trough in Dr. Gregory's possession ; the first wire 

 which Faraday made rotate electro-magnetically, at St. Bar- 

 tholomew's Hospital ; Dalton's atomic models at Manchester ; 

 and Kemp's liquefied gases in the Industrial Museum of Scot- 

 land, are alike personal relics, historical monuments, and 

 objects of instruction, which grow more and more precious 

 every year, and of which we never can havo too many." 



THE ROYAL SOCIETY I THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL. 



The Royal Society was formed with the avowed object of 

 increasing knowledge by direct experiment ; and it is worthy 

 of remark, that the charter granted by Charles II. to this cele- 

 brated institution declares that its object is the extension of 

 natural knowledge, as opposed to that which is supernatural. 



Dr. Paris (Life of Sir H. Davy, vol. ii. p. 178) says : " The 

 charter of the Royal Society states that it was established for 

 the improvement of natural science. This epithet natural was 

 originally intended to imply a meaning, of which very few 

 persons, I believe, are aware. At the period of the establish- 

 ment of the society, the arts of witchcraft and divination were 

 very extensively encouraged ; and the word natural was there- 

 fore introduced in contradistinction to supernatural." 



THE PHILOSOPHER BOYLE. 



After the death of Bacon, one of the most distinguished 

 Englishmen was certainly Robert Boyle, who, if compared 

 with his contemporaries, may be said to rank immediately 

 below Newton, though of course very inferior to him as an ori- 

 ginal thinker. Boyle was the first who instituted exact expe- 

 riments into the relation between colour and heat ; and by 

 this means not only ascertained some very important facts, 

 but laid a foundation for that union between optics and ther- 

 motics, which, though not yet completed, now merely waits 

 for some great philosopher to strike out a generalisation large 

 enough to cover both, and thus fuse the two sciences into a 

 single study. It is also to Boyle, more than to any other Eng- 

 lishman, that we owe the science of hydrostatics in the state 



