of violence were entirely candid and dispassionate. They had no aim other than truth. We are told that they awakened astonishment by their serenity; they were essentially "opposed to all spiritual frenzies." There is to us something sublime in the fortitude of these admirable men, whose aim was, in the very midst of a great civil war, to "assemble in a private house to reason freely upon the works of nature." They secured immunity by their privacy, their silence. Their efforts were accompanied by no advertisement; they met on their noble errand with the secrecy of a band of conspirators. And conspirators indeed they were; they were conspiring to tear the complicated mystery out of the blank and stolid phenomena of the world. They escaped the dreadful danger of being educational; there was, most happily, no suspicion of pedagogy about them. They eschewed "the colors of rhetoric, the devices of fancy, and the delightful deceit of fables." Their fundamental law was personal experiment. Nothing was to be taken for granted; everything was to be examined, tested, analyzed; and opinion was to be formed anew upon every subject, from the virgin evidence of the senses. We hear of no friction amongst them, no jealousy, no heartburnings. They worked in perfect unison, each, like a coral insect, contributing his atom of knowledge towards the great structure, of which not one could hope to see more than the foundation. The only merit they recognized in one another was that of a clear and deep skill in natural research, and towards the attainment of this they all worked in a loyal unity.
It was a collection of all the most splendid scientific talents of the age. The host who welcomed the other Invisibles to his lodgings, Jonathan Goddard, was a young, wealthy physician, lately come to London from Cambridge. Not thirty yet, Goddard enjoyed an immense reputation, which was steadily to increase. He was the great medical reformer of the day; under his hands anatomy ceased to be empirical, and took the form of an exact science. Goddard had the foible of universal attainment; he was the first Englishman to make telescopes. It was his restless activity, his love of investigation for its own sake, that made the circle of friends cluster about him. We are told that whenever any curious experiment was to be done, the Invisible Philosophers made Dr. Goddard their drudge till they could obtain to the bottom of it." An intimate friend of Goddard, a few months older than he, and long associated with him at the university, was John Wallis, the most eminent mathematician of his time. They were wide-minded men, those earliest apostles of English science, and the modern necessity for specialism did not weigh them down. If their physicians made telescopes, their mathematicians were anatomists. Wallis turned from his theorems to welcome with rapture the discoveries which Harvey had made, and he was the first person who publicly maintained in Cambridge the theory of the circulation of the blood, which the great anatomist had demonstrated in a book published at Frankfort in 1628.
The practical genius of Harvey even more than the theoretical genius of Bacon seems to brood over the earliest deliberations of the Invisible College. They all revered Harvey, as later Cambridge philosophers were to regard Darwin with worship, but, after his long and lonely labors, the weary protagonist of anatomical science was too old to take part in their meetings. Withdrawn to his paternal estate near Folkestone, and occasionally paying a visit to Merton College, Oxford, of which he was nominally the warden, William Harvey was now preparing for the death which came to him at last in 1657. But although the discoverer of the circulation of the blood was not an Invisible—had been indeed in his queer public prominence almost too Visible,—his spirit sustained the earnest and secret philosophers.
Unhappily, the records of the proceedings of the College are wholly lost. Perhaps they consisted merely of rough notes and records of experiment; perhaps they were destroyed in the Fire of London. The latter, or some analogous accident, seems the more likely, since their honorary secretary, or "summoner," as he was called, was a man remarkable for preciseness and orderly system. This was Dr. John Wilkins, the celebrated grammarian, astronomer, and divine, long afterwards Bishop of Chester, and already
