Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/800

meager, his carriage stooping. He wore his hair, which was of a dark brown color, hanging in long, disheveled locks over his face, and it was not until three years before his death that, conforming at last to the fashion of his time, he cut it off, and substituted a periwig. Up to the age of sixteen, he was said to have been straight, and he himself attributed his deformity to his excessive use when young of "incurvating exercises," such as working with a turning-lathe. Waller, his earliest biographer, tells us:

His eyes were gray and full, with a sharp ingenious look while younger; his nose thin, but of a moderate height and length; his mouth meanly wide, and upper lip thin; his chin sharp and forehead large; his head of a middle size. . . . He went stooping and very fast, having but a light body to carry, and a great deal of spirits and activity, especially in his youth. He was of an active, restless, indefatigable genius even almost to the last, and always slept little to his death, seldom going to sleep till two, three, or four o'clock in the morning, and seldomer to bed, oftener continuing his studies all night, and taking a short nap in the day. His temper was melancholy, mistrustful, and jealous, which more increased upon him with his years. . . . He had a piercing judgment into the dispositions of others, and would sometimes give shrewd guesses and smart characters.^[1]

The extreme parsimony, which the necessities of his early life had rendered a virtue, degenerated, as years went on, into a weakness if not into a vice. After his death, a large iron chest, which it appeared by evident signs had lain undisturbed for above thirty years, was discovered in his lodgings, and on being opened was found to contain several thousand pounds in gold and silver, accumulated by him in the lucrative employment of surveyor for the rebuilding of the city after the fire of September 3, 1666. Thus he condemned himself to a life of sordid privation, while relegating to dust and cobwebs a treasure which he was too penurious to spend, and too busy even to enjoy the miser's pleasure of counting.

It is difficult to convey an adequate idea of the multifarious and unceasing activity of Hooke's intellectual life during the forty years of his connection with the Royal Society. It reflected the boundless but fortuitous curiosity of an age which had indeed realized the bold vaunt of its herald, by leaving the pillars of Hercules of ancient lore far behind; but now found itself, like Ulysses of old, embarked on a trackless ocean without any sure pilotage to the happy isles of renovated science. Hooke and his contemporaries were inflamed with the unmeasured hopes and vast ambition of the Verulamian prophecies; but they began to be more and more conscious that the Verulamian method was but as the "golden path of rays" leading to the setting sun. They were haunted by the idea that Nature was to be interrogated, not progressively or by installments, but once for all, by a supreme inductive effort,^[2] and they could not wholly relinquish the hope that they were destined to witness its consummation. They had been

1. "Life," p. xxvii.
2. Bacon, preface to the "Parasceve," "Works," vol. i., p. 394.