402 ON THE SCOPE AND INFLUENCE OF THE 



tails the discoveries of Galileo, Torricelli, and Pascal*. 

 " It is certain," says Mr Havers, in the preface to a work 

 also published in that year, entitled, Philosophical Conferences, 

 " that Lord Bacon's way of experiment, as now prosecuted 

 " by sundry English gentlemen, affords more probabilities of 

 " glorious and profitable fruits, than the attempts of any other 

 " age or nation whatsoever f." Dr Joshua Childrey, in the 

 introduction to his Natural Rarities of England, a book of the 

 same period, and which gave rise to a new class of publica- 

 tions in Natural History, states, that he had given it the title of 

 Britannia Baconica, in order to indicate its connection with those 

 studies which Bacon had originated J. Anthony Wood has pre* 

 served a letter from the same person to Mr Oldenburg, Secreta- 

 ry of the Royal Society, in which he says, that he had long been 

 engaged in the philosophical inquiries " which form the busi- 

 " ness of that body; in consequence of having fallen in love with 

 " Lord Bacon's Philosophy as early as the year 1646 ||." Mr 

 Evelyn, one of the most active and respected of the early mem- 

 bers of the Society, has, in several of his works, alluded to the 

 beneficial effects produced by Bacon's philosophical writings. 

 In the introduction to his Sylva, which work he published 

 in 1664, at the request of the Royal Society, he takes oc- 

 casion to state the philosophical principles by which it profes- 

 sed to be guided, in terms which clearly point to the quarter 

 from whence they were derived. " They are not hasty," says 

 he, " in pronouncing from a single or incompetent number of 



" experiments ; 



* Power's Experimental Philosphy, p. 82. 



•j* Philosophical Conferences, translated from the French, by G. Havers, in 

 two volumes folio. 



% Britannia Baconica, or the Natural Rarities of England, 1661, 8vo. " From 

 this work," says A. Wood, " Dr Plot took the hint of his Natural History of 

 Oxfordshire." 



j| Athena Oxonienses, vol. ii. p. 468. 



