THE NEW SCIENCE AND PROSE 163 



Others to cure without looking on tliem at all. He projected a 

 ^lenstruum to dissolve the Stone made of Dr. Woodward's Uni- 

 versal Deluge "Water. His w^as also the device to relieve consump- 

 tive or asthmatic persons by bringing fresh air out of the Country 

 to To-s^Ti, through pipes of the nature of the Recipients of Air- 

 Pumps"."* Besides all this he had discovered a quadrature of a 

 circle, the cause of gravity, a vacuum, "the palpability of colours", 

 "perpetuum mobile", a flying engine, and "how much the in- 

 habitants of the moon eat for supper". He has at last found the 

 correct theory of the deluge. His means for determining the longi- 

 tude was sufficiently ingenious to make him famous; i. e., "to build 

 Two Poles to the IMeridian, with immense Light-houses on the top 

 of them; to supply the defect of nature, and to make the Longi- 

 tude as easy to be calculated as the Latitude ' '."^ 



All the vagaries of the new science are here, and all its activi- 

 ties are turned to ridicule. Discoveries, inventions, travels, medi- 

 cine, surgery, — whatever entered into the minds of the virtuosi is 

 laughed to scorn. True tastes suffer with the false. Martinus 

 Scriblerus, like Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, embodies the new philoso- 

 phic humor. He leaves to the Royal Society "the privilege of 

 catoptrical cookery ' ' f^ he visits ' ' the reverend Mr. Flamsteed, who 

 is the legal officer to look after the luminaries".^'' "Whatever he 

 judged beneficial to mankind, he constantly communicated (not 

 only during his stay among us, but ever since his absence) by some 

 method or other in which ostentation had no part. With what 

 incredible modesty he concealed himself, is knowTi to numbers of 

 those to whom he addressed sometimes Epistles, Advice to Friends, 

 Projects of First Ministers, Letters to Members of Parliament, Ac- 

 counts to the Royal Society, and innumerable others".*'® Here 

 again is an exploitation of a humor, wherein all suffer alike, the 

 good and the bad, the wise man and the fool. 



Arbuthnot's wit found attractive material in the new phil- 

 osophy. There is a burlesque on scientific research in his Learned 



** Pope's Works, vol. VI, pp. 159-60. 



«Ibid. vol. VI, p. 159. 



«« Swift's Wks. vol. XVI, p. 178. 



''Ibid. 179. 



«* Pope's Wks. vol. VI, p. 161. 



