475 
of Edinburgh, Session 1877 - 78 . 
of their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of 
use and practice for man’s life and knowledge. These we call Dowry- 
men, or Benefactors. Then, after divers meetings and consults of 
our whole number, to consider of the former labours and collections, 
we have three that take care, out of them, to direct new experi- 
ments, of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former. 
These we call Lamps. W e have three others that do execute the ex- 
periments so directed, and report them. These we call Inoculators. 
Lastly, we have three that raise the former discoveries by experi- 
ments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we 
call Interpreters of Nature.” 
Rawley, Lord Bacon’s chaplain and literary executor, says in his 
preface to the New Atlantis , which was published in 1627, soon 
after Bacon’s death — “ This fable my lord devised, to the end that 
hee might exhibite therein a modell or description of a college, in- 
stituted for the interpreting of nature, and the producing of great 
and marvellous works for the benefit of men, under the name of 
4 Solomon’s House, or the College of the Six Dayes’ Works.’” 
Bacon’s imaginative conception, being so consonant as it was to 
the spirit of the age, took root and fructified in the minds of many 
of his countrymen, both those who were passing through the trying 
scenes of the civil war in England, and those who had accompanied 
Charles II. into his exile. The first attempt to realize the concep- 
tion seems to have been made about nineteen years after Bacon’s 
death, in the year 1645, by the formation in London of a scientific 
society called the “ Philosophical College,” which was also called the 
“ Invisible College.” Dr Wallis, in his autobiography, speaks of this 
society as consisting of “divers worthy persons, inquisitive into natural 
philosophy and other parts of human learning, and particularly of what 
hath been called the New Philosophy, or Experimental Philosophy.” 
Several eminent Oxford men who were in London in 1645, 
owing to the interruption of university work caused by the civil 
wars, became members of the “ Invisible College;” and in 1649, 
returning to their Alma Mater , they founded the Philosophical 
Society of Oxford, which used to meet in the house of Dr Wilkins, 
then Warden of Wadham College, and afterwards Bishop of Chester, 
or in the apartments of the Hon. Robert Boyle, who was then re- 
siding in Oxford. 
