Transactions of section (J. 863 



feigebtaical I'easoning to geometrical conceptions and astronomical observa- 

 tions. 



Of course his freedom of thought offended many, both the Jesuits, in whose 

 school he had been educated, and the pastors of the Reformed Church, among 

 whom he lived in Holland. And it is well known that he delayed to give to the 

 world some of his best ideas owing to the way in which Galileo had been treated 

 by the Church. 



The English philosophical writer, Thomas Hobbes, by the publication of his 

 work called ' The Leviathan,' was also educating the minds of Englishmen in the 

 direction of sound knowledge. 



It is interesting, however, to note that the new ideas had not as yet sunk deeply 

 into the minds of the English people. 



Shakespeare remarks : ' He that is giddy thinks the world turns round ' 

 ('Taming of the Shrew'). Bacon also nsver accepted the Copernican theory, and if 

 we turn to the eighth book of ' Paradise Lost ' we find that although Milton, who 

 had visited Galileo in Italy, and who was well acquainted with the theory of 

 Copernicus, founds his whole poem on a Ptolemaic basis, yet he was, apparently 

 from the words which he puts into the mouth of the archangel Raphael, halting 

 between two opinions. 



We now have to note another of the experimental philosophers in Christian 

 Huygens. 



Up to his time, the means of making accurate observations in which time was 

 concerned was a most difficult, nay almost an impossible, matter. By his introduction 

 of the pendulum, as a regulator of clocks, he at once placed in the hands of men 

 of science one of its most valuable instruments. 



His work on the centre of oscillation and the cycloidal curve shows how deeply 

 he worked out the theory. 



His observations on double I'efraction, and his promulgation of the theory of 

 an elastic ethereal medium in which the vibrations of light are carried on, place 

 him in the forefront of the observers of his time. 



The sagacious Hooke, Wren, Wallis, and Newton's great master Barrow, as 

 well as the distinguished Boyle and the indefatigable Oldenburgh, were all carrying 

 forward the work which distinguishes this period ; and when we look back to 

 those pleasant meetings at Wadham College, Oxford, during the Commonwealth 

 we contemplate a body of men working for true science who were to be the founders 

 of that Royal Society which has done so much for the advancement of science 

 throughout the world. 



The labours of all the great men of whom I have yet spoken were at this 

 period gradually drawing together a vast mass of facts which required some com- 

 mon explanation. The rudiments of mechanical science were beginning to teach 

 the truth as to the laws of falling and oscillating bodies. 



The Ptolemaic system, with its complex theories, was gradually yielding to the 

 accumulated evidence in favour of the Copernican system. 



The erroneous idea of circular motion had yielded, as the fruit of Kepler's per- 

 severing work, to the law of elliptical orbits. 



But yet the minds of many men were still directed by the idea that the 

 planets were carried round the sun by some inherent force in themselves, and in 

 the same very imperfect way they were beginning gradually to think that this 

 force, be it what it might, acted in inverse ratio to the square of the distance. 



Matters were in this state when there arose the greatest genius that the English 

 race has yet produced, the retiring, the sensitive, and the devout Isaac Newton, 

 who, acting like an electric spark in a mixed and chaotic mass of vapour, at once 

 precipitated, as it were, the confusion, and brought to light, with a dazzling bril- 

 liancy, the gravitation theory, which not only accounted for all the difficulties which 

 his contemporaries were struggling with, but at one bound elucidated those many 

 and confusing motions of the heavenly bodies which had hitherto been the stum- 

 bling block of observers. 



By his discoveries, for the first time an accurate scale was given to the universe, 

 and in his statement that every particle of matter in the universe is attracted 



