DEcEMBER 27, 1918] 
the Inquisition to renounce his teachings. 
This was five years after the publication of 
Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the 
blood, which the intellectual world received 
with merciless criticism as being contrary to 
the doctrines of Galen. These were also the 
days of the Thirty Years War in Germany, a 
war of religious intolerance. 
In 1651 Harvey published his “ De Genera- 
tione,” which was the finest piece of observa- 
tion and analysis of his day. In 1656 he trans- 
ferred property to his college which yielded 
an income of fifty-six pounds to be used as a 
salary for a librarian and to found an annual 
oration the object of which was “ to search out 
and study the secrets of nature by way of ex- 
periment.” 
In 1660 the Royal Society of London was 
founded, the progenitor of which was the Royal 
Society Club, the oldest club in Europe. This 
latter was made up of men who clubbed to- 
gether and ate their meals at a tavern, and the 
club still continues ‘to dine weekly in London, 
drinking three toasts, “‘ The King,” “ The Arts 
and Sciences” and “ The Royal Society.” 
In Robert Boyle’s “ Hydrostatical Para- 
doxes,” printed at Oxford in 1666, the preface 
begins: 
The Rise of the following Treatise being a Com- 
mand imposed on me by the Royal Society. 
Instead of being persecuted as Harvey had 
been, Boyle had the support of his friends of 
the Royal Society. On the last page of Boyle’s 
volume he describes a biological experiment in 
which he had placed a tadpole under pressure 
equal to that of a column of water between two 
or three hundred feet high and concludes as 
follows: 
And yet all this weight being unable to oppress, 
or so much as manifestly to hurt, the tender Tad- 
pole (which a very small weight would suffice to 
have crushed if it prest only upon one part of it 
and not on the other) we may thence learn the Truth 
of what we have been endeavoring to evince: That 
though water be allowed to press against water 
and all immersed Bodys; yet a Diver may well re- 
main unoppressed at a great depth under water as 
long as the pressure of it is uniform against all the 
parts exposed thereunto. 
SCIENCE 
631 
We learn from this application of the Law of 
Pascal (“the ingenious Monsieur Pascal,” 
Boyle calls him) how quickly the age of his- 
torical research liberated the mind so that an 
age of experimental observation set in. 
Another hundred years roll around and 
bring to us the eccentric Cavendish, who dis- 
covered hydrogen and who was also a faithful 
attendant of the Royal Society; and Lavoisier, 
the master scientist of France; and our own 
Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Thompson, 
the latter also known as Count Rumford. 
Although the first half of the last century 
was a brilliant era in French science, it was 
not until about 1850 that Germany fully dis- 
sociated science from speculative philosophy 
and entered the field of scientific progress. 
Liebig; a pupil of Gay-Lussac, brought into 
Germany from Paris the knowledge of chem- 
istry as it had been expounded by Lavoisier and 
Berthollet. It should be remembered that in 
the Middle Ages until 1618 Germany was a 
land of peaceful traders and there arose im- 
portant cities, such as Augsburg and Nurem- 
burg. In the latter city Hans Sachs had com- 
posed 6,000 pieces of poetry and Diirer had 
painted his wonderful masterpieces. It was a 
time of prosperity and cultivation, in evidence 
of which free public baths were being intro- 
duced into the cities in imitation of the Roman 
establishments. Then came the Thirty Years 
War, between 1618 and 1648, which is said to 
have reduced the population of Germany from 
30,000,000 to 5,000,000 inhabitants. This war, 
carried on between Protestants and Catholics, 
brought abject poverty to the people, who re- 
verted well nigh into barbarism. Germany was 
in this condition at the time of the founding 
of the Royal Society of London. Leibniz, who 
had visited Paris and London, was the 
founder and first president of the Academy of 
Sciences at Berlin which dates from the year 
1700. 
Tt is interesting to note that the town of 
Munich was put in orderly condition by Ben- 
jamin Thompson, who was born in ‘the neigh- 
borhood of Concord, New Hampshire. Thomp- 
son, who was created Count Rumford, was a 
scientist of distinction and his work upon heat 
