THE REVIVAL OF SCIENCE 301 



every opportunity. . . . His greatest single im- 

 provement was the division of the herbs into 

 Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons. ... He made 

 things much easier for Linnaeus, as did Linnaeus 

 in his turn for naturalists who now smile at his 

 mistakes. Both were capable of proposing hap- 

 hazard classifications, a fact which need not 

 surprise us, when we reflect how much reason we 

 have to suspect that the best arrangements of 

 birds, teleostean fishes, insects and flowering plants 

 known to our own generation need to be largely 

 recast." 



Great as were the seventeenth century philo- 

 sophers in the biological and medical sciences, 

 they were paralleled if not surpassed by workers 

 on the physical and mathematical side. Robert 

 Boyle who has been described as the Father 

 of Chemistry and Brother of the Earl of Cork 

 was, even as a boy of eighteen, one of the leaders 

 in the comparatively new pursuit of experimental 

 science. His first love was chemistry, " Vulcan 

 has so transported and bewitched me as to make 

 me fancy my laboratory a kind of Elysium/' 

 thus he wrote in 1649. A few years later (1652-3), 

 in Ireland, where he was called to look after the 

 family estates, he found it " hard to have any 



