Chapter XXXIV (1)

HISTORY OF PHYSICAL AND OTHER LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

SECT. I.

ON EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

_Institutions for Science at Florence--London--Paris--Chemistry--Boyle and others._

|Reasons for omitting mathematics.|

1. We have now arrived, according to the method pursued in corresponding periods, at the history of mathematical and physical science in the latter part of the seventeenth century. But I must here entreat my readers to excuse the omission of that which ought to occupy a prominent situation in any work that pretends to trace the general progress of human knowledge. The length to which I have found myself already compelled to extend these volumes, might be an adequate apology; but I have one more insuperable in the slightness of my own acquaintance with subjects so momentous and difficult, and upon which I could not write without presumptuousness and much peril of betraying ignorance. The names, therefore, of Wallis and Huygens, Newton and Leibnitz, must be passed with distant reverence.

|Academy del Cimento.|

2. This was the age, when the experimental philosophy, to which Bacon had held the torch, and which had already made considerable progress, especially in Italy, was finally established on the ruins of arbitrary figments and partial inductions. This philosophy was signally indebted to three associations, the eldest of which did not endure long; but the others have remained to this day, the perennial fountains of science; the Academy del Cimento at Florence, the Royal Society of London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris. The first of these was established in 1657, with the patronage of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II., but under the peculiar care of his brother Leopold. Both were, in a manner at that time remarkable, attached to natural philosophy; and Leopold, less engaged in public affairs, had long carried on a correspondence with the learned of Europe. It is said that the advice of Viviani, one of the greatest geometers that Europe has produced, led to this institution. The name this Academy assumed, gave promise of their fundamental rule, the investigation of truth by experiment alone. The number of Academicians was unlimited, and all that was required as an article of faith was the abjuration of all faith, a resolution to inquire into truth without regard to any previous sect of philosophy. This Academy lasted, unfortunately, but ten years in vigour; it is a great misfortune for any literary institution to depend on one man, and especially on a prince, who, shedding a factitious, as well as sometimes a genuine lustre round it, is not easily replaced without a diminution of the world’s regard. Leopold, in 1667, became a cardinal, and was thus withdrawn from Florence; others of the Academy del Cimento died or went away, and it rapidly sunk into insignificance. But a volume containing reports of the yearly experiments it made, among others, the celebrated one showing the incompressibility of water, is generally esteemed.[1060]

[1060] Galluzzi, Storia del Gran Ducato, vol. vii., p. 240.
Tiraboschi, xi., 204. Corniani, viii., 29.

|Royal Society.|

3. The germ of our Royal Society may be traced to the year 1645, when Wallis, Wilkins, Glisson, and others less known, agreed to meet weekly at a private house in London, in order to converse on subjects connected with natural, and especially experimental philosophy. Part of these soon afterwards settled in Oxford; and thus arose two little societies in connection with each other, those at Oxford being recruited by Ward, Petty, Willis, and Bathurst. They met at Petty’s lodgings till he removed to Ireland in 1652; afterwards at those of Wilkins, in Wadham College, till he became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1659; about which time most of the Oxford philosophers came to London, and held their meetings in Gresham College. They became more numerous after the Restoration, which gave better hope of a tranquillity indispensable for science; and, on the 28th of November, 1660, agreed to form a regular society which should meet weekly for the promotion of natural philosophy; their registers are kept, from this time.[1061] The king, rather fond himself of their subjects, from the beginning afforded them his patronage; their first charter is dated 15th July, 1662, incorporating them by the style of the Royal Society, and appointing Lord Brouncker the first president, assisted by a council of twenty, the conspicuous names among which are Boyle, Kenelm Digby, Wilkins, Wren, Evelyn, and Oldenburg.[1062] The last of these was secretary, and editor of the Philosophical Transactions, the first number of which appeared March 1, 1665, containing sixteen pages in quarto. These were continued monthly, or less frequently, according to the materials he possessed. Oldenburg ceased to be the editor in 1677, and was succeeded by Grew, as he was by Hooke. These early transactions are chiefly notes of conversations and remarks made at the meetings, as well as of experiments either then made or reported to the Society.[1063]

[1061] Birch’s Hist. of Royal Society, vol. i., p. 1.

[1062] Birch’s Hist. of Royal Society, vol. i., p. 88.

[1063] Id. vol. ii., p. 18. Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society,
p. 7.

|Academy of Sciences at Paris.|

4. The Academy of Sciences at Paris was established in 1666, under the auspices of Colbert. The king assigned to them a room in the royal library for their meetings. Those first selected were all mathematicians; but other departments of science, especially chemistry and anatomy, afterwards furnished associates of considerable name. It seems, nevertheless, that this Academy did not cultivate experimental philosophy with such unremitting zeal as the Royal Society, and that abstract mathematics have always borne a larger proportion to the rest of their inquiries. They published in this century ten volumes, known as Anciens Mémoires de l’Academie. But near its close, in 1697, they received a regular institution from the king, organising them in a manner analogous to the two other great literary foundations, the French Academy, and that of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres.[1064]

[1064] Fontenelle, vol. v., p. 23. Montucla, Hist. des
Mathématiques, vol. ii., p. 557.

|State of Chemistry.|

5. In several branches of physics, the experimental philosopher is both guided and corrected by the eternal laws of geometry. In others he wants this aid, and, in the words of his master, knows and understands no more concerning the order of nature, than, as her servant and interpreter, he has been taught by observation and tentative processes. All that concerns the peculiar actions of bodies on each other was of this description; though, in our own times, even this has been, in some degree, brought under the omnipotent control of the modern analysis. Chemistry, or the science of the molecular constituents of bodies, manifested in such peculiar and reciprocal operations, had never been rescued from empirical hands till this period. The transmutation of metals, the universal medicine, and other inquiries utterly unphilosophical in themselves, because they assumed the existence of that which they sought to discover, had occupied the chemists so much that none of them had made any further progress than occasionally by some happy combination or analysis, to contribute an useful preparation to pharmacy, or to detect an unknown substance. Glauber and Van Helmont were the most active and ingenious of these elder chemists; but the former has only been remembered by having long given his name to sulphate of soda, while the latter wasted his time on experiments from which he knew not how to draw right inferences, and his powers on hypotheses which a sounder spirit of the inductive philosophy would have taught him to reject.[1065]

[1065] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry, i., 183.

|Becker.|

6. Chemistry, as a science of principles, hypothetical, no doubt, and in a great measure unfounded, but cohering in a plausible system, and better than the reveries of the Paracelsists and Behmenists, was founded by Becker, in Germany, by Boyle and his contemporaries of the Royal Society in England. Becker, a native of Spire, who, after wandering from one city of Germany to another, died in London in 1685, by his Physica Subterranea, published in 1669, laid the foundation of a theory, which having in the next century been perfected by Stahl, became the creed of philosophy till nearly the end of the last century. “Becker’s theory,” says an English writer, “stripped of everything but the naked statement, may be expressed in the following sentence: besides water and air there are three other substances, called earths, which enter into the composition of bodies; namely the fusible or vitrifiable earth, the inflammable or sulphureous, and the mercurial. By the intimate combination of earths with water is formed an universal acid, from which proceed all other acid bodies; stones are produced by the combination of certain earths, metals by the combination of all the three earths in proportions which vary according to the metal.”[1066]

[1066] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 468.

|Boyle.|

7. No one Englishman of the seventeenth century, after Lord Bacon, raised to himself so high a reputation in experimental philosophy as Robert Boyle; it has even been remarked, that he was born in the year of Bacon’s death, as the person destined by nature to succeed him. An eulogy which would be extravagant, if it implied any parallel between the genius of the two; but hardly so, if we look on Boyle as the most faithful, the most patient, the most successful disciple who carried forward the experimental philosophy of Bacon. His works occupy six large volumes in quarto. They may be divided into theological or metaphysical, and physical or experimental. Of the former, we may mention, as the most philosophical, his Disquisition into the Final Causes of Natural Things, his Free Inquiry into the Received Notion of Nature, his Discourse of Things above Reason, his Considerations about the Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion, his Excellency of Theology, and his Considerations on the Style of the Scriptures; but the latter, his chemical and experimental writings, form more than two thirds of his prolix works.

|His metaphysical works.|

8. The metaphysical treatises, to use that word in a large sense, of Boyle, or rather those concerning Natural Theology, are very perspicuous, very free from system, and such as bespeak an independent lover of truth. His Disquisition on Final Causes, was a well-timed vindication of that palmary argument against the paradox of the Cartesians, who had denied the validity of an inference from the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the universe to an intelligent Providence. Boyle takes a more philosophical view of the principle of final causes than had been found in many theologians, who weakened the argument itself by the presumptuous hypothesis, that man was the sole object of Providence in the Creation.[1067] His greater knowledge of physiology led him to perceive that there are both animal, and what he calls cosmical ends, in which man has no concern.

[1067] Boyle’s Works, vol. v., p. 394.

|Extract from one of them.|

9. The following passage is so favourable a specimen of the philosophical spirit of Boyle, and so good an illustration of the theory of _idols_ in the Novum Organum, that, although it might better, perhaps, have deserved a place in a former chapter, I will not refrain from inserting it. “I know not,” he says, in his Free Inquiry into the received Notion of Nature, “whether it be a prerogative in the human mind, that, as it is itself a true and positive being, so is it apt to conceive all other things as true and positive beings also; but whether or no this propensity to frame such kind of ideas supposes an excellency, I fear it occasions mistakes, and makes us think and speak after the manner of true and positive beings, of such things as are but chimerical, and some of them negations or privations themselves; as death, ignorance, blindness, and the like. It concerns us, therefore, to stand very carefully upon our guard, that we be not insensibly misled by such an innate and unheeded temptation to error, as we bring into the world with us.”[1068]

[1068] Vol. v., p. 161.

|His merits in physics and chemistry.|

10. Boyle improved the air-pump and the thermometer, though the latter was first made an accurate instrument of investigation by Newton. He also discovered the law of the air’s elasticity, namely, that its bulk is inversely as the pressure. For some of the principles of hydrostatics we are indebted to him, though he did not possess much mathematical knowledge. The Philosophical Transactions contain several valuable papers by him on this science.[1069] By his “Sceptical Chemist,” published in 1661, he did much to overturn the theories of Van Helmont’s school, that commonly called of the iatro-chemists, which was in its highest reputation; raising doubts as to the existence, not only of the four elements of the peripatetics, but of those which these chemists had substituted. Boyle holds the elements of bodies to be atoms of different shapes and sizes, the union of which gives origin to what are vulgarly called elements.[1070] It is unnecessary to remark that this is the prevailing theory of the present age.

[1069] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 400, 411.

[1070] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry, i. 205.

|General character of Boyle.|

11. I shall borrow the general character of Boyle and of his contemporaries in English chemistry from a modern author of credit. “Perhaps Mr. Boyle may be considered as the first person neither connected with pharmacy nor mining, who devoted a considerable degree of attention to chemical pursuits. Mr. Boyle, though in common with the literary men of his age he may be accused of credulity, was both very laborious and intelligent; and his chemical pursuits, which were various and extensive, and intended solely to develop the truth without any regard to previously conceived opinions, contributed essentially to set chemistry free from the trammels of absurdity and superstition, in which it had been hitherto enveloped, and to recommend it to philosophers as a science deserving to be studied on account of the important information which it was qualified to convey. His refutation of the alchemistical opinions respecting the constituents of bodies, his observations on cold, on the air, on phosphorus, and on ether, deserve particularly to be mentioned as doing him much honour. We have no regular account of any one substance or of any class of bodies in Mr. Boyle, similar to those which at present are considered as belonging exclusively to the science of chemistry. Neither did he attempt to systematize the phenomena, or to subject them to any hypothetical explanation.

|Of Hooke and others.|

12. But his contemporary, Dr. Hooke, who had a particular predilection for hypothesis, sketched in his Micrographia a very beautiful theoretical explanation of combustion, and promised to develop his doctrine more fully in a subsequent book; a promise which he never fulfilled; though in his Lampas, published about twenty years afterwards, he has given a very beautiful explanation of the way in which a candle burns. Mayow, in his Essays, published at Oxford about ten years after the Micrographia, embraced the hypothesis of Dr. Hooke without acknowledgment; but clogged it with so many absurd additions of his own as greatly to obscure its lustre and diminish its beauty. Mayow’s first and principal Essay contains some happy experiments on respiration and air, and some fortunate conjectures respecting the combustion of the metals; but the most valuable part of the whole is the chapter on affinities; in which he appears to have gone much farther than any other chemist of his day, and to have anticipated some of the best established doctrines of his successors. Sir Isaac Newton, to whom all the sciences lie under such great obligations, made two most important contributions to chemistry, which constitute, as it were, the foundation stones of its two great divisions. The first was pointing out a method of graduating thermometers, so as to be comparable with each other in whatever part of the world observations with them are made. The second was by pointing out the nature of chemical affinity, and showing that it consisted in an attraction by which the constituents of bodies were drawn towards each other and united; thus destroying the previous hypothesis of the hooks, and points, and rings, and wedges, by means of which the different constituents of bodies were conceived to be kept together.”[1071]

[1071] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 466.

|Lemery.|

13. Lemery, a druggist at Paris, by his Cours de Chymie in 1675, is said to have changed the face of the science; the change, nevertheless, seems to have gone no deeper. “Lemery,” says Fontenelle, “was the first who dispersed the real or pretended obscurities of chemistry, who brought it to clearer and more simple notions, who abolished the gross barbarisms of its language, who promised nothing but what he knew the art could perform; and to this he owed the success of his book. It shows not only a sound understanding, but some greatness of soul, to strip one’s own science of a false pomp.”[1072] But we do not find that Lemery had any novel views in chemistry, or that he claims with any irresistible pretension the title of a philosopher. In fact, his chemistry seems to have been little more than pharmacy.

[1072] Eloge de Lemery, in Œuvres de Fontenelle, v. 361.
Biog. Universelle.

SECT. II.

ON NATURAL HISTORY.

_Zoology--Ray--Botanical Classifications--Grew--Geological Theories._

|Slow Progress of Zoology.|

14. The accumulation of particular knowledge in Natural History must always be progressive, where any regard is paid to the subject; every traveller in remote countries, every mariner may contribute some observation, correct some error, or bring home some new species. Thus zoology had made a regular advance from the days of Conrad Gesner; yet, with so tardy a step, that, reflecting on the extensive intercourse of Europe with the Eastern and Western world, we may be surprised to find how little Jonston in the middle of the seventeenth century, had added, even in the most obvious class, that of quadrupeds, to the knowledge collected one hundred years before. But hitherto zoology, confined to mere description, and that often careless or indefinite, unenlightened by anatomy, unregulated by method, had not merited the name of a science. That name it owes to John Ray.

|Before Ray.|

15. Ray first appeared in Natural History as the editor of the Ornithology of his highly accomplished friend Francis Willoughby, with whom he had travelled over the continent. This was published in 1676; and the History of Fishes followed in 1686. The descriptions are ascribed to Willoughby, the arrangement to Ray, who might have considered the two works as in great part his own, though he has not interfered with the glory of his deceased friend. Cuvier observes, that the History of Fishes is the more perfect work of the two, that many species are described which will not be found in earlier ichthyologists, and that those of the Mediterranean especially are given with great precision.[1073]

[1073] Biographie Universelle, art. Ray.

|His Synopsis of Quadrupeds.|

16. Among the original works of Ray we may select the Synopsis Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis, published in 1693. This book makes an epoch in zoology, not for the additions of new species it contains, since there are few wholly such, but as the first classification of animals that can be reckoned both general and grounded in nature. He divides them into those with blood and without blood. The former are such as breathe through lungs, and such as breathe through gills. Of the former of these again some have a heart with two ventricles, some with one only. And among the former class of these some are viviparous, some oviparous. We thus come to the proper distinction of Mammalia. But in compliance with vulgar prejudice, Ray did not include the cetacea in the same class with quadrupeds, though well aware that they properly belonged to it, and left them as an order of fishes.[1074] Quadrupeds he was the first to divide into _ungulate_ and _unguiculate_, hoofed and clawed, having himself invented the Latin words.[1075] The former are _solidipeda_, _bisulca_, or _quadrisulca_; the latter are _bifida_ or _multifida_; and these latter with undivided, or with partially divided toes; which latter again may have broad claws, as monkeys, or narrow claws; and these with narrow claws he arranges according to their teeth, as either carnivora, or leporina, now generally called rodentia. Besides all these quadrupeds which he calls analoga, he has a general division called anomala, for those without teeth, or with such peculiar arrangements of teeth as we find in the insectivorous genera, the hedgehog and mole.[1076]

[1074] Nos ne a communi hominum opinione nimis recedamus, et ut
affectatæ novitatis notam evitemus, cetaceum aquatilium genus,
quamvis cum quadrupedibus viviparis in omnibus fere præter, quam
in pilis et pedibus et elemento in quo degunt convenire
videantur, piscibus annumerabimus, p. 55.

[1075] P. 50.

[1076] P. 56.

|Merits of this work.|

17. Ray was the first zoologist who made use of comparative anatomy; he inserts at length every account of dissections that he could find; several had been made at Paris. He does not appear to be very anxious about describing every species; thus in the simian family he omits several well known.[1077] I cannot exactly determine what quadrupeds he has inserted that do not appear in the earlier zoologists; according to Linnæus, in the twelfth-edition of the Systema Naturæ, if I have counted rightly, they amount to thirty-two; but I have found him very careless in specifying the synonyms of his predecessors, and many for which he only quotes Ray, are in Gesner or Jonston. Ray has however much the advantage over these in the brevity and closeness of his specific characters. The particular distinction of his labours, says Cuvier, consists in an arrangement more clear, more determinate than those of any of his predecessors, and applied with more consistency and precision. His distribution of the classes of quadrupeds and birds have been followed by the English naturalists almost to our own days; and we find manifest traces of that he has adopted as to the latter class in Linnæus, in Brisson, in Buffon, and in all other ornithologists.[1078]

[1077] Hoc genus animalium tum caudatorum tum cauda carentium
species valde numerosæ sunt; non tamen multos apud autores fide
dignos descriptæ occurrunt. He only describes those species he
has found in Clusius or Marcgrave, and what he calls Parisienses,
such, I presume, as he had found in the Memoirs of the Académie
des Sciences. But he does not mention the Simia Inuus, or the S.
Hamadryas, and several others of the most known species.

[1078] Biogr. Univ.

|Redi.|

|Swammerdam.|

18. The bloodless animals, and even those of cold blood, with the exception of fishes, had occupied but little attention of any good zoologists till after the middle of the century. They were now studied with considerable success. Redi, established as a physician at Florence, had yet time for that various literature which has immortalized his name. He opposed, and in a great degree disproved by experiment, the prevailing doctrine of the equivocal generation of insects, or that from corruption; though where he was unable to show the means of reproduction, he had recourse to a paradoxical hypothesis of his own. Redi also enlarged our knowledge of intestinal animals, and made some good experiments on the poison of vipers.[1079] Malpighi, who combated like Redi, the theory of the reproduction of organised bodies from mere corruption, has given one of the most complete treatises on the silkworm that we possess.[1080] Swammerdam, a Dutch naturalist, abandoned his pursuits in human anatomy to follow up that of insects, and by his skill and patience in dissection made numerous discoveries in their structure. His General History of Insects 1669, contains a distribution into four classes, founded on their bodily forms and the metamorphoses they undergo. A posthumous work, Biblia Naturæ, not published till 1738, contains, says the Biographie Universelle, “a multitude of facts wholly unknown before Swammerdam; it is impossible to carry farther the anatomy of these little animals, or to be more exact in the description of the organs.”

[1079] Biogr. Univ. Tiraboschi, ix. 252.

[1080] Idem.

|Lister.|

19. Lister, an English physician, may be reckoned one of those who have done most to found the science of conchology by his Historia sive Synopsis Conchyliorum, in 1685; a work very copious and full of accurate delineations: and also by his three treatises on English animals, two of which relate to fluviatile and marine shells. The third, which is on spiders, is not less esteemed in entomology. Lister was also perhaps the first to distinguish the specific characters, such at least as are now reckoned specific, though probably not in his time, of the Asiatic and African elephant. “His works in natural history and comparative anatomy are justly esteemed, because he has shown himself an exact and sagacious observer, and has pointed out with correctness the natural relations of the animals that he describes.”[1081]

[1081] Biogr. Univ. Chalmers.

|Comparative anatomy.|

20. The beautiful science which bears the nonsensical name of comparative anatomy had but casually occupied the attention of the medical profession.[1082] It was to them, rather than to mere zoologists, that it owed, and indeed strictly must always owe, its discoveries, which had hitherto been very few. It was now more cultivated; and the relations of structure to the capacities of animal life became more striking, as their varieties were more fully understood; the grand theories of final causes found their most convincing arguments. In this period, I believe, comparative anatomy made an important progress, which in the earlier part of the eighteenth century was by no means equally rapid. France took the lead in these researches. “The number of papers on comparative anatomy,” says Dr. Thomson, “is greater in the memoirs of the French Academy than in our national publication. This was owing to the pains taken during the reign of Louis XIV. to furnish the Academy with proper animals, and the number of anatomists who received a salary, and of course devoted themselves to anatomical subjects.” There are however about twenty papers in the Philosophical Transactions before 1700 on this subject.[1083]

[1082] It is most probable that this term was originally designed
to express a comparison between the human structure and that of
brutes, though it might also mean one between different species
of the latter. In the first sense it is never now used, and the
second is but a small though important part of the science.
_Zootomy_ has been suggested as a better name, but it is not
quite analogical to anatomy; and on the whole it seems as if we
must remain with the old word, protesting against its propriety.

[1083] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 114.

|Botany.|

|Jungius.|

21. Botany, notwithstanding the gleams of philosophical light which occasionally illustrate the writings of Cæsalpin and Columna, had seldom gone farther than to name, to describe, and to delineate plants with a greater or less accuracy and copiousness. Yet it long had the advantage over zoology, and now when the latter made a considerable step in advance, it still continued to keep a-head. This is a period of great importance in botanical science. Jungius of Hamburgh, whose posthumous Isagoge Phytoscopica was published in 1679, is said to have been the first in the seventeenth century who led the way to a better classification than that of Lobel; and Sprengel thinks that the English botanists were not unacquainted with his writings; Ray indeed owns his obligations to them.[1084]

[1084] Sprengel, Hist. Rei Herbariæ, vol. ii., p. 32.

|Morison.|

22. But the founder of classification, in the eyes of the world, was Robert Morison, of Aberdeen, professor of botany at Oxford; who, by his Hortus Blesensis, in 1669; by his Plantarum Umbelliferarum Distributio Nova, in 1672; and chiefly by his great work Historia Plantarum Universalis, in 1678, laid the bases of a systematic classification, which he partly founded, not on trivial distinctions of appearance, as the older botanists, but, as Cæsalpin had first done, on the fructifying organs. He has been frequently charged with plagiarism from that great Italian, who seems to have suffered, as others have done, by failing to carry forward his own luminous conceptions into such details of proof as the world justly demands; another instance of which has been seen in his very striking passages on the circulation of the blood. Sprengel, however, who praises Morison highly, does not impute to him this injustice towards Cæsalpin, whose writings might possibly be unknown in Britain.[1085] And it might be observed also, that Morison did not as has sometimes been alledged, establish the fruit as the sole basis of his arrangement. Out of fifteen classes, into which he distributes all herbaceous plants, but seven are characterised by this distinction.[1086] “The examination of Morison’s works,” says a late biographer, “will enable us to judge of the service he rendered in the reformation of botany. The great botanists, from Gesner to the Bauhins, had published works, more or less useful by their discoveries, their observations, their descriptions, or their figures. Gesner had made a great step in considering the fruit as the principal distinction of genera. Fabius Columna adopted this view; Cæsalpin applied it to a classification which should be regarded as better than any that preceded the epoch of which we speak. Morison had made a particular study of fruits, having collected 1,500 different species of them, though he did not neglect the importance of the natural affinities of other parts. He dwells on this leading idea, insists on the necessity of establishing generic characters, and has founded his chief works on this basis. He has therefore done real service to the science; nor should the vanity which has made him conceal his obligations to Cæsalpin induce us to refuse him justice.”[1087] Morison speaks of his own theory with excessive vanity, and deprecates all earlier botanists as full of confusion. Several English writers have been unfavourable to Morison, out of partiality to Ray, with whom he was on bad terms; but Tournefort declares that if he had not enlightened botany it would still have been in darkness.

[1085] Sprengel, p. 34.

[1086] Pulteney, Historical Progress of Botany in England,
vol. i., p. 307.

[1087] Biogr. Universelle.

|Ray.|

23. Ray, in his Methodus Plantarum Nova, 1682, and in his Historia Plantarum Universalis, in three volumes, the first published in 1686, the second in 1688, and the third, which is supplemental, in 1704, trod in the steps of Morison, but with more acknowledgment of what was due to others, and with some improvements of his own. He described 6,900 plants, many of which are now considered as varieties.[1088] In the botanical works of Ray we find the natural families of plants better defined, the difference of complete and incomplete flowers more precise, and the grand division of monocotyledons and bicotyledons fully established. He gave much precision to the characteristics of many classes, and introduced several technical terms, very useful for the perspicuity of botanical language; finally, he established many general principles of arrangement which have since been adopted.[1089] Ray’s method of classification was principally by the fruit, though he admits its imperfections. “In fact, his method,” says Pulteney, “though he assumes the fruit as the foundation, is an elaborate attempt, for that time, to fix natural classes.”[1090]

[1088] Pulteney. The account of Ray’s life and botanical
writings in this work occupies nearly 100 pages.

[1089] Biogr. Universelle.

[1090] P. 259.

|Rivinus.|

24. Rivinus, in his Introductio in Rem Herbariam, Leipsic, 1690, a very short performance, struck into a new path, which has modified to a great degree the systems of later botanists. Cæsalpin and Morison had looked mainly to the fruit as the basis of classification; Rivinus added the flower, and laid down as a fundamental rule that all plants which resemble each other both in the flower and in the fruit ought to bear the same generic name.[1091] In some pages of this Introduction, we certainly find the basis of the Critica Botanica of Linnæus.[1092] Rivinus thinks the arrangement of Cæsalpin the best, and that Morison has only spoiled what he took; of Ray he speaks in terms of eulogy, but blames some part of his method. His own is primarily founded on the flower, and thus he forms eighteen classes, which, by considering the differences of the fruits, he subdivides into ninety-one genera. The specific distinctions he founded on the general habit and appearance of the plant. His method is more thoroughly artificial, as opposed to natural; that is, more established on a single principle, which often brings heterogeneous plants and families together, than that of any of his predecessors; for even Ray had kept the distinction of trees from shrubs and herbs, conceiving it to be founded in their natural fructification. Rivinus set aside wholly this leading division. Yet he had not been able to reduce all plants to his method, and admitted several anomalous divisions.[1093]

[1091] Biogr. Univ.

[1092] Id.

[1093] Biogr. Univ. Sprengel, p. 56.

|Tournefort.|

25. The merit of establishing an uniform and consistent system was reserved for Tournefort. His Elémens de la Botanique appeared in 1694; the Latin translation, Institutiones Rei Herbariæ, in 1700. Tournefort, like Rivinus, took the flower, or corolla, as the basis of his system; and the varieties in the structure, rather than number, of the petals furnish him with his classes. The genera--for, like other botanists before Linnæus, he has no intermediate division--are established by the flower and fruit conjointly, or now and then by less essential differences, for he held it better to constitute new genera than, as others had done, to have anomalous species. The accessory parts of a plant are allowed to supply specific distinctions. But Tournefort divides vegetables, according to old prejudice--which it is surprising that, after the precedent of Rivinus to the contrary, he should have regarded--into herbs and trees; and thus he has twenty-two classes. Simple flowers, monopetalous or polypetalous, form eleven of these; composite flowers, three; the apetalous, one; the cryptogamous, or those without flower or fruit, make another class; shrubs or _suffrutices_ are placed in the seventeenth; and trees, in five more, are similarly distributed, according to their floral characters.[1094] Sprengel extols much of the system of Tournefort, though he disapproves of the selection of a part so often wanting as the corolla for the sole basis; nor can its various forms be comprised in Tournefort’s classes. His orders are well marked, according to the same author; but he multiplied both his genera and species too much, and paid too little attention to the stamina. His method was less repugnant to natural affinities, and more convenient in practice than any which had come since Lobel. Most of Tournefort’s generic distinctions were preserved by Linnæus, and some which had been abrogated without sufficient reason, have since been restored.[1095] Ray opposed the system of Tournefort, but some have thought that in his later works he came nearer to it, so as to be called magis corollista quam fructista.[1096] This, however, is not acknowledged by Pulteney, who has paid great attention to Ray’s writings.

[1094] Biogr. Univ. Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 34.
Sprengel, p. 64.

[1095] Biogr. Universelle.

[1096] Id.

|Vegetable physiology.|

|Grew.|

26. The classification and description of plants constitute what generally is called botany. But these began now to be studied in connection with the anatomy and physiology of the vegetable world; a phrase, not merely analogical, because as strictly applicable as to animals, but which had never been employed before the middle of the seventeenth century. This interesting science is almost wholly due to two men, Grew and Malpighi. Grew first directed his thoughts towards the anatomy of plants in 1664, in consequence of reading several books of animal anatomy, which suggested to him that plants, being the works of the same Author, would probably show similar contrivances. Some had introduced observations of this nature, as Highmore, Sharrock, and Hooke, but only collaterally; so that the systematic treatment of the subject, following the plant from the seed, was left quite open for himself. In 1670, he presented the first book of his work to the Royal Society, who next year ordered it to be printed. It was laid before the society in print, December, 1671; and on the same day a manuscript by Malpighi on the same subject was read. They went on from this time with equal steps; Malpighi, however, having caused Grew’s book to be translated for his own use. Grew speaks very honourably of Malpighi, and without claiming more than the statement of facts permits him.[1097]

[1097] Pulteney. Chalmers. Biogr. Univ. Sprengel calls Grew’s
book opus absolutum et immortale.

|His Anatomy of Plants.|

27. The first book of his Anatomy of Plants, which is the title given to three separate works, when published collectively in 1682, contains the whole of his physiological theory, which is developed at length in those that follow. The nature of vegetation and its processes seem to have been unknown when he began; save that common observation, and the more accurate experience of gardeners and others, must have collected the obvious truths of vegetable anatomy. He does not quote Cæsalpin, and may have been unacquainted with his writings. No man, perhaps, who created a science, has carried it farther than Grew; he is so close and diligent in his observations, making use of the microscope, that comparatively few discoveries of great importance have been made in the mere anatomy of plants since his time;[1098] though some of his opinions are latterly disputed by Mirbel and others of a new botanical school.

[1098] Biogr. Univ.

|He discovers the sexual system.|

28. The great discovery ascribed to Grew is of the sexual system in plants. He speaks thus of what he calls the attire, though rather, I think, in obscure terms:--“The primary and chief use of the attire is such as hath respect to the plant itself, and so appears to be very great and necessary. Because even those plants which have no flower or foliature, are yet some way or other attired, either with the seminiform or the floral attire. So that it seems to perform its service to the seeds as the foliature to the fruit. In discourse, hereof, with our learned Savilian professor, Sir Thomas Millington, he told me he conceived that the attire doth serve, as the male, for the generation of the seed. I immediately replied that I was of the same opinion, and gave him some reasons for it, and answered some objections which might oppose them. But withal, in regard every plant is αρρενοθηλυς [arrenothêlus], or male and female, that I was also of opinion that it serveth for the separation of some parts as well as the affusion of others.”[1099] He proceeds to explain his notion of vegetable impregnation. It is singular that he should suppose all plants to be hermaphrodite, and this shows he could not have recollected what had long been known, as to the palm, or the passages in Cæsalpin relative to the subject.

[1099] Book iv., ch. 1. He had hinted at some “primary and
private use of the attire,” in book i., ch. 5.

|Camerarius confirms this.|

29. Ray admitted Grew’s opinion cautiously at first: Nos ut verisimilem tantum admittimus. But in his Sylloge Stirpium, 1694, he fully accedes to it. The real establishment of the sexual theory, however, is due to Camerarius, professor of botany at Tubingen, whose letter on that subject, published 1694, in the work of another, did much to spread the theory over Europe. His experiments, indeed, were necessary to confirm what Grew had rather hazarded as a conjecture than brought to a test; and he showed that flowers deprived of their stamina do not produce seeds capable of continuing the species.[1100] Woodward, in the Philosophical Transactions, illustrated the nutrition of plants, by putting sprigs of vegetables in phials filled with water, and after some time determining the weight they had gained and the quantity they had imbibed.[1101] These experiments had been made by Van Helmont, who had inferred from them that water is convertible into solid matter.[1102]

[1100] Sprengel. Biogr. Univ. Pulteney, p. 338.

[1101] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 58.

[1102] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry.

|Predecessors of Grew.|

|Malpighi.|

30. It is just to observe that some had preceded Grew in vegetable physiology. Aromatari, in a letter of only four pages, published at Venice in 1625, on the generation of plants from seeds, which was reprinted in the Philosophical Transactions, showed the analogy between grains and eggs, each containing a minute organised embryo, which employs the substances inclosing it for its own development. Aromatari has also understood the use of the cotyledons.[1103] Brown, in his Inquiry into Vulgar Errors, has remarks on the budding of plants, and on the quinary number they affect in their flower. Kenelm Digby, according to Sprengel, first explained the necessity in vegetation for oxygen, or vital air, which had lately been discovered by Bathurst. Hooke carried the discoveries hitherto made in vegetable anatomy much farther in his Micrographia. Sharrock and Lister contributed some knowledge, but they were rather later than Grew. None of these deserve such a place as Malpighi, who, says Sprengel, was not inferior to Grew in acuteness, though, probably, through some illusions of prejudice, he has not so well understood and explained many things. But the structure and growth of seeds he has explained better, and Grew seems to have followed him. His book is also better arranged and more concise.[1104] The Dutch did much to enlarge botanical science. The Hortus Indicus Malabaricus of Rheede, who had been a governor in India, was published at his own expense in twelve volumes, the first appearing in 1686; it contains an immense number of new plants.[1105] The Herbarium Amboinense of Rumphius was collected in the seventeenth century, though not published till 1741.[1106] Several botanical gardens were formed in different countries; among others that of Chelsea was opened in 1686.[1107]

[1103] Sprengel. Biogr. Univ.

[1104] Sprengel, p. 15.

[1105] Biogr. Univ. The date of the first volume is given
erroneously in the B. U.

[1106] Id.

[1107] Sprengel. Pulteney.

|Early notions of geology.|

31. It was impossible that men of inquiring tempers should not have been led to reflect on those remarkable phenomena of the earth’s visible structure, which being in course of time accurately registered and arranged, have become the basis of that noble science, the boast of our age, geology. The first thing which must strike the eyes of the merest clown, and set the philosopher thinking, is the irregularity of the surface of our globe; the more this is observed, the more signs of violent disruption, and of a prior state of comparative uniformity appear. Some, indeed, of whom Ray seems to have been one,[1108] were so much impressed by the theory of final causes that, perceiving the fitness of the present earth for its inhabitants, they thought it might have been created in such a state of physical ruin. But the contrary inference is almost irresistible. A still more forcible argument for great revolutions in the history of the earth is drawn from a second phenomenon of very general occurrence, the marine and other fossil relics of organised beings, which are dug up in strata far remote from the places where these bodies could now exist. It was common to account for them by the Mosaic deluge. But the depth at which they are found was incompatible with this hypothesis. Others fancied them to be not really organised, but sports of nature, as they were called, the casual resemblances of shells and fishes in stone. The Italians took the lead in speculating on these problems; but they could only arrive now and then at a happier conjecture than usual, and do not seem to have planned any scheme of explaining the general structure of the earth.[1109] The Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher, famous for the variety and originality of his erudition, contains probably the geology of his age, or at least his own. It was published in 1662. Ten out of twelve books relate to the surface or the interior of the earth, and to various terrene productions; the remaining two to alchemy and other arts connected with mineralogy. Kircher seems to have collected a great deal of geographical and geological knowledge. In England, the spirit of observation was so strong after the establishment of the Royal Society, that the Philosophical Transactions, in this period, contain a considerable number of geognostic papers, and the genius of theory was aroused, though not at first in his happiest mood.[1110]

[1108] See Ray’s Three Physico-Theological Discourses on
the Creation, Deluge, and final Conflagration. 1692.

[1109] Lyell’s Principles of Geology, vol. i., p. 25.

[1110] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society.

|Burnet’s Theory of Earth.|

|Other geologists.|

32. Thomas Burnet, master of the Charterhouse, a man fearless and somewhat rash, with more imagination than philosophy, but ingenious and eloquent, published in 1694 his Theoria Telluris Sacra, which he afterwards translated into English. The primary question for the early geologists had always been how to reconcile the phenomena with which they were acquainted to the Mosaic narratives of the creation and deluge. Every one was satisfied that his own theory was the best; but in every case it has hitherto proved, whatever may take place in future, that the proposed scheme has neither kept to the letter of Scripture, nor to the legitimate deductions of philosophy. Burnet gives the reins to his imagination more than any other writer on that which, if not argued upon by inductive reasoning, must be the dream of one man, little better in reality, though it may be more amusing, than the dream of another. He seems to be eminently ignorant of geological facts, and has hardly ever recourse to them as evidence. And accordingly, though his book drew some attention as an ingenious romance, it does not appear that he made a single disciple. Whiston opposed Burnet’s theory, but with one not less unfounded, nor with less ignorance of all that required to be known. Hooke, Lister, Ray, and Woodward came to the subject with more philosophical minds, and with a better insight into the real phenomena. Hooke seems to have displayed his usual sagacity in conjecture; he saw that the common theory of explaining marine fossils by the Mosaic deluge would not suffice, and perceived that, at some time or other, a part of the earth’s crust must have been elevated and another part depressed by some subterraneous power. Lister was aware of the continuity of certain strata over large districts, and proposed the construction of geological maps. Woodward had a still more extensive knowledge of stratified rocks; he was in a manner the founder of scientific mineralogy in England, but his geological theory was not less chimerical than those of his contemporaries.[1111] It was first published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1695.[1112]

[1111] Lyell, p. 31.

[1112] Thomson, p. 207.

|Protogæa of Leibnitz.|

33. The Protogæa of Leibnitz appears, in felicity of conjecture and minute attention to facts, far above any of these. But this short tract was only published in 1749, and on reading it, I have found an intimation that it was not written within the seventeenth century. Yet I cannot refrain from mentioning that his hypothesis supposes the gradual cooling of the earth from igneous fusion; the formation of a vast body of water to cover the surface, a part of his theory but ill established, and apparently the weakest of the whole; the subsidence of the lower parts of the earth, which he takes to have been once on the level of the highest mountains, by the breaking in of vaulted caverns within its bosom;[1113] the deposition of sedimentary strata from inundations, their induration, and the subsequent covering of these by other strata through fresh inundations; with many other notions which have been gradually matured and rectified in the process of the science.[1114] No one can read the Protogæa without perceiving that of all the early geologists, or indeed of all down to a time not very remote, Leibnitz came nearest to the theories which are most received in the English school at this day. It is evident that if the literal interpretation of Genesis, by a period of six natural days, had not restrained him, he would have gone much farther in his views of the progressive revolutions of the earth.[1115] Leibnitz had made very minute inquiries, for his age, into fossil species, and was aware of the main facts which form the basis of modern geology.[1116]

[1113] Sect. 21. He admits also a partial elevation by
intumescence, but says, ut vastissimæ Alpes ex solida jam terra
eruptione surrexerint, minus consentaneum puto. Scimus tamen et
in illis deprehendi reliquias maris. Cum ergo alterutrum factum
oporteat, credibilius multo arbitror defluxisse aquas spontaneo
nisu, quam ingentem terrarum partem incredibili violentia tam
alte ascendisse. Sect. 22.

[1114] Facies teneri adhuc orbis sæpius novata est; donec
quiescentibus causis atque æquilibratis, consistentior emergeret
status rerum. Unde jam duplex origo intelligitur firmorum
corporum; una cum ignis fusione refrigescerent, altera cum
reconcrescerent ex solutione aquarum. Neque igitur putandum est
_lapides ex sola esse fusione_. Id enim potissimum de prima
tantum massa ex terræ basi accipio; Nec dubito, postea materiam
liquidam in superficie telluris procurrentem, quiete mox reddita,
ex ramentis subactis ingentem materiæ vim deposuisse, quorum alia
varias terræ species formarunt, alia in saxa induruere, e quibus
strata diversa sibi super imposita diversas præcipitationum vices
atque intervalla testantur. Sect. 4.

This he calls the incunabula of the world, and the basis of a new
science, which might be denominated “naturalis geographia.” But
wisely adds, licet conspirent vestigia veteris mundi in præsenti
facie rerum, tamen rectius omnia definient posteri, ubi
curiositas eo processerit, ut per rejar regiones procurrentia
soli genera et strata describant. Sect. 5.

[1115] See sect. 21, et alibi.

[1116] Sect. 24, et usque ad finem libri.

SECT. III.

ON ANATOMY AND MEDICINE.

34. Portal begins the history of this period, which occupies more than 800 pages of his voluminous work, by announcing it as the epoch most favourable to anatomy: in less than fifty years the science put on a new countenance; nature is interrogated, every part of the body is examined with an observing spirit; the mutual intercourse of nations diffuses the light on every side; a number of great men appear, whose genius and industry excite our admiration.[1117] But for this very reason I must, in these concluding pages, glide over a subject rather foreign to my own studies and to those of the generality of my readers with a very brief enumeration of names.

[1117] Hist. de l’Anatomie, vol. iii, p. 1.

|Circulation of blood established.|

35. The Harveian theory gained ground, though obstinate prejudice gave way but slowly. It was confirmed by the experiment of transfusing blood, tried on dogs, at the instance of Sir Christopher Wren, in 1657, and repeated by Lower in 1661.[1118] Malpighi in 1661, and Leeuwenhoek in 1690, by means of their microscopes, demonstrated the circulation of the blood in the smaller vessels, and rendered visible the anastomoses of the arteries and veins, upon which the theory depended.[1119] From this time it seems to have been out of doubt. Pecquet’s discovery of the thoracic duct, or rather of its uses, as a reservoir of the chyle from which the blood is elaborated, for the canal itself had been known to Eustachius, stands next to that of Harvey, which would have thrown less light on physiology without it, and like his, was perseveringly opposed.[1120]

[1118] Sprengel, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. iv., p. 120.

[1119] Id. p. 126, 142.

[1120] Portal. Sprengel.

|Willis-Vieussens.|

36. Willis, a physician at Oxford, is called by Portal, who thinks all mankind inferior to anatomists, one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived; his bold systems have given him a distinguished place among physiologers.[1121] His Anatomy of the Brain, in which, however, as in his other works, he was much assisted by an intimate friend, and anatomist of the first character, Lower, is, according to the same writer, a masterpiece of imagination and labour. He made many discoveries in the structure of the brain, and has traced the nerves from it far better than his predecessors, who had in general very obscure ideas of their course. Sprengel says that Willis is the first who has assigned a peculiar mental function to each of the different parts of the brain; forgetting, as it seems, that this hypothesis, the basis of modern phrenology, had been generally received, as I understand his own account, in the sixteenth century.[1122] Vieussens of Montpelier carried on the discoveries in the anatomy of the nerves, in his Neurographia Universalis, 1684; tracing those arising from the spinal marrow which Willis had not done, and following the minute ramifications of those that are spread over the skin.[1123]

[1121] P. 88. Biogr. Univ.

[1122] Sprengel, p. 250. See vol. iii., p. 204.

[1123] Portal, vol. iv., p. 5. Sprengel, p. 256, Biogr. Univ.

|Malpighi.|

|Other anatomists.|