ii6 STEPHEN HALES 



niggling biographer, and his broad vigorous out- 

 lines must form the basis of what anyone, who 

 follows him, can write about the botanists of a 

 past day. 



To return to Hales' birth. It is of interest to 

 note how he fits into the changing procession of 

 lives, to see what great men overlap his youth, who 

 were his contemporaries in his maturity, and who 

 were appearing on the scientific stage as he was 

 leaving it. 



Sir Isaac Newton was the dominant figure in 

 English science while Hales was developing. He 

 died in 1727, the year in which Hales published 

 his Vegetable Staticks, a book, which like the Origin 

 of Species, appeared when its author was 50 years 

 of age. Newton was at the zenith of his fame when 

 Hales was a little boy of 10 — his Principia having 

 been published in 1687, and when Hales went 

 up to Cambridge in 1696 he must have seen the 

 great man coming from his rooms^ in the N.E. 

 corner of the Great Court of Trinity — that corner 

 where Newton's and other more modern ghosts 

 surely walk — Macaulay who used to read, pacing 

 to and fro by the chapal,* and Thackeray who, 

 like his own Esmond, lived "near to the famous 

 Mr. Newton's lodgings." In any case there can 

 be no doubt that the genius of Newton cast its 

 light on Hales, as Sachs has clearly pointed out 



1 In 1699 Newton was made Master of the Mint and appointed 

 Whiston his deputy in the Lucasian Professorship, an office he 

 finally resigned in 1703 (Brewster's Life of Newton, 1831, p. 249). 



' " There, if anywhere, his dear shade must linger," Trevelyan, 

 Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (i volume edit. 1881, p. 55). 



