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Portrait of Sir Christopher Wren
From a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller
perous era of their existence. One gathers that, for all their modesty, they found it impossible any longer to be quite as "invisible" as they proposed to be. Anything in the nature of biological or experimental philosophy had up to that date been entirely unknown at Oxford, and the rumor of these meetings created no small sensation.
It attracted to them some of the most illustrious men of the day, amongst others Seth Ward, the mathematician, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, and the physician Thomas Willis, to whom is attributed the motto, notable enough in those wild times of prejudice, that "learning is of no party." But most active of all, except the indomitable Robert Boyle, was a youth of twenty, named Christopher Wren, who was a gentleman-commoner of Wadham, and who was already famous in the university for his geometrical genius. He did not as yet show any of that disposition to architecture which was to make him, as Sir Christopher Wren, one of the most prominent of Englishmen, but he was full of scientific ardor and energy. We are told that he was one of the earliest of those who joined the Invisible Philosophers after their arrival at Oxford, and that he "exhibited to them many new theories, inventions, experiments, and mechanic improvements."
A list of these has been preserved, displaying the extraordinary activity of Wren's invention, and helping us, too, to understand what kind of subjects the Invisible Philosophers discussed. The papers which Wren laid before the society appear
