168 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



dogs alive, or impaling insects upon the point of a needle for 

 microscopical investigations; besides those that are employed in 

 the gathering of weeds and the chase of butterflies ; not to mention 

 the cockle-shell merchants and spider-catchers". The works of 

 Sir Isaac Newton occupy a place beside the French romances on 

 the shelves in the library of the learned lady.^^ The evil effect 

 which the new science may have upon the minds of young women 

 is explained in a letter from a man who has two nieces deeply im- 

 bued with the virtuoso spirit. These two young women talk of 

 "the magnetical virtue of the loadstone rather than the best way 

 to make a sack-posset"; they scorn to express themselves in other 

 than Latin derivatives; and, finally, they will not let their uncle 

 "smoke one pipe in the quiet" of ignorance.®^ With the appear- 

 ance of seriousness The Spectator suggests that a fitting employ- 

 ment for the Royal Society would be a new natural history.** It 

 is claimed, however, that these papers have usurped the original 

 purpose of the new scientific interest; namely, "to draw men's 

 minds off from the bitterness of party ".^^ 



But in spite of the "Chymist's jargon", the quacks and charla- 

 tans in medicine, and the useless studies of insects, The Spectator 

 finds much to admire in the new philosophy. Bacon, Boyle, and 

 Newton are mentioned with praise,*® and the new "theories of the 

 earth and the heavens" have "gratified and enlarged the imagina- 

 tion".*^ The studies in anatomy have revealed how "fearfully and 

 wonderfully the human frame is made".** Addison caught a 

 glimpse of that new and revolutionizing idea of the new science, 

 that the earth is a mere speck in space, that man is but "an atom 

 of this atom world". "In the same manner, when I considered that 

 , infinite host of stars, or, to speak philosophically, of suns, which 

 i were then shining upon me, with those innumerable sets of planets 

 or worlds, which were moving around their respective suns ; when 

 I still enlarged the idea, and supposed another heaven of suns, and 



® The Spectator, Number 54. 



®Ibid. 242. 



** Ibid. 121. 



»Ibid. 262. 



»The Spectator, 554 (Hughes), 543 (Addison). 



"Ibid. 420 (Addison). 



«8Ibid. 543 (Addison). 



