596 REPORT — 1894. 



■was sent at twelve years of age with a tutor to the Continent ; he remained abroad 

 for six jears. He studied chiefly at Geneva and at Florence, where he read the 

 works of Galileo. Returning to Eng-land in 1644, he busied himself with chemistry 

 at Stalbridgf, a manor in Dorsetshire left him by his father. On his visits to 

 J^ondon he became one of the members of the 'Invisible College,' the germ of the 

 lioyal Society. 'Vulcan has so bewitched me,' he writes at the age of twenty- 

 three, 'as to make me fancy my laboratory a kind of elysium.' 



Drawn to Oxford in 1654, Boyle spent here the most active years of his life in 

 experimental researcli. Of Boyle's scientific writings much lias been said in extra- 

 vagant praif-e and much in ridicule. Boerhaave wrote : ' To him we owe the 

 secrets of fire, air, water, animals, vegetables, and fossils.' This phrase is not 

 more grotesque than that of a recent writer, who says, ' Boyle's name is identified 

 with no great discovery.' Br. Johnson has very justly remarked, in a number of 

 the 'Rambler:' ' It is well known how much of our philo.sopby is derived from 

 Boyle's discoveries, yet very few have read the details of his experiments. Hi» 

 name is indeed reverenced, but his works are neglected.' It is, indeed, rather hard 

 to read through one of Boyle's papers, even in the abridged form. Though clear, 

 they are discursive. The writer cannot rid himself entirely of the essences and 

 qualities of the alchemists ; and it is only when we compare these records with 

 the works of Van Helmont, his immediate predecessor, that we recognise the 

 enormous advance that has been made by Boyle. I must pass over his physical 

 work on the elasticity of the air. It must suffice to say that he established by 

 most careful experiment the law which is known by his name — that the volume of 

 a given mass of air varies inversely as the pressure upon it. He determined the 

 density of the air, and pointed out that bodies altered in weight according to the 

 varying buoyancy of the atmosphere. One of his most important chemical papers — 

 certainly the one most frequently cited — is 'The Sceptical Chemist,' published 

 anonymously in 1661. I will attempt the briefest account of it. The opening 

 words of the dialogue strike the keynote of the whole : — 



' Notwithstanding the subtle reasonings of the Peripatetics and the pretty 

 experiments of the Chymists, I am so diilident as to think that, if neither cao 

 produce more cogent arguments than are usually given, a man may reasonably 

 doubt as to the number of those material ingredients of mixed bodies which some 

 call elements and others principles.' He proceeds, through the mouth of one of 

 the supposed disputants, to attack the doctrine of the three elements, the tria 

 prima of the alchemists— sulphur, mercury, and salt. ' There are some bodies,' he 

 says, 'from which it has not yet been made to appear that any degree of fire can 

 separate either salt, or sulphur, or mercury, much less all the three. Gold is the 

 most obvious instance. It may be heated for months in a furnace without losing 

 weight or altering in character, and yet one of its supposed constituents is volatile 

 and another combustible. Neither can water or solvents separate any of the three 

 principles from gold ; the metal may be added to, and so brought into solution and 

 into crystalline compounds, but the gold particles are present all the time ; and 

 the metal may be reduced to the same weight of yellow, ponderous, malleable 

 substance it was before its mixture.' He points out the confusion which earlier 

 chemists had made between calcination in the open air and distillation in retorts ; 

 he shows that in compounds, e.g., copper nitrate, the particles retain their nature, 

 although disguised, in the combination, for the nitric acid may be separated by 

 heat, the copper by precipitation. But the sceptical chemist, though pouring- 

 ridicule on the tria prima, could not but admit the power of water to produce 

 organic substances. He quotes Van Helmont's famous experiment of growing a 

 shoot of willow in baked earth moistened with distilled water, and he repeats the 

 experiment in various forms. Ignorant of the existence of carbonic acid in the 

 air (discovered a century later by Black), he is driven to conclude that the plant 

 is fashioned out of the pure water. But he rejects the doctrine — as old as Thales 

 j»nd as modern as Van Helmont — that water is the foundation of all things. 

 M. de Rochas had publisbeJ a remarkable experiment on water. By artificial 

 heat, by graduations of coagulations and congelations, he had turned it into earth 

 which produced animals, vegetables, and minerals. The minerals began to grow 



