his own country house of Stalbridge, in Dorsetshire, where he buried himself for that purpose in his nineteenth year. We read of the great earthen furnace which he set up there, of his limbecs and recipients, of his wind-gun and his magnetics, and we form an impression of him thus youthful, but with the freshness fading from him, all the natural joys of life neglected, wholly absorbed in, and as it were blighted by, his vain scientific passion.
From Stalbridge, Robert Boyle was accustomed to come up to London to attend the meetings of the Invisible Philosophers, and, young as he was—not twenty years of age at the beginning,—his ardor made itself felt at once. He seems at first to have had little ambition to produce his results, and none to dazzle the world with publications—
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Portrait of Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury
From an engraving by David Loggan
Oh, such a life as he proposed to live,
When he had learned it,
When he had gathered all books had to give!
Sooner, he spurned it.
The fortune of Robert Boyle, as a seventh son, was not large. He spent all the income of it on his experiments; it was said of him that his whole life was absorbed in the pursuit of nature, as a hound pursues a hart without a moment's deviation of purpose through the labyrinth of the forest; he neglected love and politics and sport, all the legitimate pleasures, that he might devote every hour of his existence to the discovery of natural causes. Such was the character of the extraordinary man who presented himself, like an atom of consuming radium, in the midst of the little circle of Invisible Philosophers.
In 1049 the Invisibles underwent an important transformation. So many of them were now engaged at Oxford that it was determined to try the dangerous experiment of removing the society to that university. It might have been fatal to it; as a matter of fact, it gave it new vitality. Dr. Petty, the young political economist, afterwards so widely known as Sir William Petty, welcomed the philosophers with enthusiasm, and offered them hospitality. They met in his rooms over an apothecary's shop, where they could conveniently inspect drugs and the like. Almost immediately Petty was made a fellow of Brasenose, and the Invisibles met in his rooms in college until 1652, when Petty was sent to Ireland as physician to the army. Wilkins then invited them to meet in the lodge of Wadham College, of which he was the master, and now began the most pros-
