 | An image should appear at this position in the text. To use the entire page scan as a placeholder, edit this page and replace "{{missing image}}" with "{{raw image|Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/119}}". Otherwise, if you are able to provide the image then please do so. For guidance, see Wikisource:Image guidelines and Help:Adding images. |  |
Photograph copyrighted by W. E. Wilson
Engraved by Isaac Taylor (1730 1807), from a drawing by Samuel Wale (died 1786)
house in London, the gardens of which extended from Old Broad Street to Bishopsgate Street. This had been the mansion of the munificent Sir Thomas Gresham, who had devised it by his celebrated will to become "the new nursery of the Muses"; it was, unhappily, pulled down in consequence of a short-sighted act of Parliament, in 1768. At Gresham House the Invisibles met on Wednesdays, after the lecture of the astronomy professor, and here the meetings seem to have been more formal. Dr. William Croone, the anatomist, acted as the first registrar, and took notes of all that passed. But there was still no ceremony, and they avoided the formality of standing orders. If Sprat is to be understood, they merely proposed each week some particular experiments which were to be prosecuted on the next, in order to avoid confusion and waste of time.
The history of the Invisibles becomes a little obscure as we approach the Restoration, but in 1657 they were joined by the poet Abraham Cowley, who came to Oxford for a time, and took the degree of M.D. He was at this time deeply interested in botany, and was composing his Latin poem De Plantarum. The temper of Cowley was experimental in several respects, and he now formed the resolution to make "labor about natural science the perpetual and uninterrupted task" of the remainder of his life. Unhappily, the remainder of that brilliant and useful life was to be brief. But Cowley was able to perform one great service. He perceived that if only "that right Porphyrian tree" could be planted in the heart of English culture,
The Phœnix Truth would on it rest
And build his perfumed nest.
It was Cowley who conceived the plan of a philosophical college endowed for the advancement of experimental physics, out of which the Royal Society ultimately rose. When that body was incorporated, on the 22d of April, 1663, its nucleus was formed by the survivors of that College of Invisible Philosophers which had collected nearly twenty years before over the telescope-shop in Wood Street.
