Page images
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

periments; in the same year also appeared his Seraphic Love, a piece which had been written as early as 1648. In 1661 he issued certain physiological essays and other tracts; and in 1662 his Sceptical Chemist. All these were successful, and were reprinted--some of them more than once-within a few years. In 1663, on the incorporation of the Royal Society, he was appointed one of the council. In the same year he published Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy; Experiments upon Colours, a curious and useful work; and Considerations upon the Style of the Holy Scriptures. In the year 1665 appeared his Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects, a work satirized by Swift, but which is said to have actually given that genius his first hint of Gulliver's Travels. In that year also was issued New Experiments and Observations on Cold. On the 8th March, 1666, he wrote his celebrated letter to Mr. Stubbe on the controversy as to Valentine Greatrakes, who professed to cure diseases by stroking. This letter is upwards of twenty octavo pages in length, "very learned and very judicious, wonderfully correct in diction and style, remarkably clear in method and form, highly exact in the observations and remarks, and abounding in pertinent and curious facts. Yet it appears it was written within the compass of a single morning." In this year also he published Hydrostatica Paradoxes and The Origin of Forms and Qualities.

Free Enquiry into the vulgarly received Notion of Nature, 1691; and finally, in same year, Experimenta et Observationes Physicæ.

In 1677 Boyle, who was a director of the East India Company, printed at Oxford and sent abroad 500 copies of the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles in the Malayan tongue, and in November of this year he was appointed president of the Royal Society. In the early part of 1689 his health began to decline, and on the 18th of July, 1691, he made his will. In October of that year he grew worse, chiefly owing, it is supposed, to the illness of his favourite sister, who died on the 23d December. On the 30th he followed her, dying peacefully in the sixty-fifth year of his age.

Among the good deeds of Boyle's life we must not omit to mention his large contributions to the printing and publishing of Bibles for Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; his contributions towards propagating Christianity in America; his large expenditure over the publication and dispersal of an Arabic edition of Grotius, On the Truth of the Christian Religion; and above all, his establishment of the Boyle Lectures in Defence of Revealed Religion.

Boyle never married; but in early life it is said he loved a fair daughter of Cary, earl of Monmouth, and to this we owe the production of Seraphic Love.

As to Boyle's present position in the theological, philosophical, and scientific worlds we will say nothing. What it was in his own time, and for long after, is well indicated in the words of Boerhaave, who declares that

In 1668 Boyle settled permanently in London in the house of his beloved sister Lady Ranelagh, and from this until his death work after work appeared from his pen in rapid succes-"Boyle, the ornament of his age and country, sion.

We cannot do more than name the chief of them here:--Continuation of Experiments touching the Spring and Weight of Air, 1669; Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things, 1670; Essay on the Origin and Virtue of Gems, 1672; Essays on the Strange Subtlety, &c., of Effluvia, 1673; The Excellence of Theology, 1673; The Saltness of the Sea, &c., 1674; Some Considerations about the Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion, 1675; Experiments about the Mechanical Origin or Production of Particular Qualities, 1676; Historical Account of a Degradation of Gold by an Anti-Elixir, 1678; Discourse of Things above Reason, 1681; Memoirs on the Natural History of Human Blood, 1684; Essay on the Great Effects of Even, Languid, and Unheeded Motion, 1690; Of the High Veneration Man's Intellect Owes to God, 1690; The Christian Virtuoso, 1690;

VOL. I.

succeeded to the genius and inquiries of the great Chancellor Verulam. To him we owe the secrets of fire, air, water, animals, vegetables, fossils: so that from his works may be deduced the whole system of natural knowledge."]

SOME CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF THE RESURRECTION. (FROM COLLECTED WORKS PUBLISHED IN 1772.) They who assent to the possibility of the resurrection of the same bodies, will, I presume, be much more easily induced to admit the possibility of the qualifications the Christian religion ascribes to the glorified bodies of

5

« EelmineJätka »