128 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
modern Knowledge and Science — more especially in Mechanics 
and Optics. He first pointed out the laws which govern the 
refraction of Light in passing from one medium to another, and 
explained the rainbow colours ; and he very nearly arrived at the 
explanation, which Newton afterwards made, of the structure of 
Light. I pass around a portrait of him, made in 1644, the year 
in which he wrote his Meditations. The inscription states that 
he was borne at La Haye, in the province of Touraine, on the last 
day of March, 1596, and styles him "Lord of Perron" — Perron 
being the name of a small estate he inherited from his mother. 
So far as one can judge from the portrait, it would indicate that 
he was a man of a somewhat sarcastic and cynical turn of mind. 
After receiving as good an education as the times would permit, 
at the Jesuit College of La Fleche, he went to Paris, where he 
studied for four years in great seclusion. At the age of twenty- 
one he entered the army, joining the troops of Prince Maurice of 
Nassau in Holland, his motive being the desire of seeing men and 
the world. He travelled over the best part of the civilised world, 
and finally settled at Amsterdam, in 1629, at the age of thirty- 
three years — Holland being then the land of freedom, civil and 
literary. He also preferred the cooler atmosphere of the Low 
Countries to the heat of Italy and France. In the former he 
could think with cool head ; in the latter he could only produce 
phantasies of the brain. 
Here he wrote his celebrated Discourse on Method ; and Saisset 
has well said, " It ought not to be forgotten that in publishing the 
Method Descartes joined to it, as a supplement, the Dioptrics, the 
Geometry, and the Meteors. Thus at one stroke he founded, on 
the basis of a new method, two sciences hitherto almost unknown 
and of infinite importance — Mathematical Physics and the appli- 
cation of Algebra to Geometry; and at the same time he gave 
the Prelude to the Meditations and the Principles — that is to say, 
to an original Metaphysic, and the Mechanical Theory of the 
Universe. " The publication of the Method brought on the enmity 
of Yoet, a Protestant clergyman at Utrecht, who accused 
Descartes of Atheism. Yoet, with Schook, of Groningen, tried 
to get the magistrates to condemn him as an atheist and 
calumniator — as atheist, apparently because he had given new 
proofs of the existence of God ; as calumniator, because he had 
repelled the calumnies of his enemies. 
