FRESHWATER AND ROBERT HOOKE, FRESHWATER, beloved of visitors who at the seaside resent the accompaniment of a number of persons airing themselves on the sands, has for its chief distinction the circumstance that it is the residence of the greatest poet of the present day. Wherever the English tongue is spoken, Freshwater is known to fame, because there lives, and thinks, and writes, the author of In Memoriam. Two hundred and fifty years ago Freshwater was the birthplace of one of the most devoted cultivators of natural philosophy of his age, and certainly the most scientific inquirer that the Isle of Wight has ever produced-Robert Hooke. Two of the most competent historians of natural science, Humboldt in his Cosmos and Whewell in his History of the Inductive Sciences, have spoken in the highest terms of Robert Hooke's scientific sagacity and comprehensive genius. From these two authorities, Alexander von Humboldt and Whewell, I have taken my estimate of the scientific value of the many hints and suggestions contained in Hooke's papers in the Philosophical Transactions. Other books have enabled me to piece together the history of the life of one to whom scant justice has been done, for, as will be seen, besides his skill and sagacity as a chemist, Hooke had a remarkable fertility and quickness of mechanical invention. His speculations ranged over the whole field of natural philosophy from the minutest disclosures of the microscope to beyond the furthest sweep of the telescope. Such a man ought to hold a high place in the annals of science. The neglect from which he has suffered is in great measure due to himself. His jealous and rapacious temper and sordid personal habits, which made him an object of dislike in his own day, have probably somewhat affected the judgement of posterity. In all fairness the constitution of his bodily frame, which was small of stature, thin, and crooked, must be taken as an excuse for what in his day would have been called Hooke's splenetic temperament. Yet spleen is no apology for his practice of laying claim to the inventions and discoveries of other men, which involved him in much personal controversy. On July 18, 1635, in the Rectory-house of Freshwater was born a boy, whom his father, the minister of that parish, christened by the name of Robert. He was a puny child, and for the first seven years he was so sickly that he was not expected to live. The gossiping John Aubrey gives a sketch of his early boyhood, when he was educated by his father at home. The child is father of the man'; the little lad, crooked like a note of interrogation, was always asking questions. He did not lisp in numbers, after the fashion of youthful poets. He amused himself with the construction of mechanical toys, such as a wooden clock, which showed in a rough manner the hours of the day, and a full-rigged ship, about a yard long, which had a contrivance for firing guns as it sailed across the sea. As Whewell has remarked, this fondness for making models and machines appears to be a common prelude to excellence in physical science, as in the case of Newton, Galileo and others. With this turn of mind his parents came to the conclusion that he should be apprenticed to a watch-maker or a painter. Those were evil days for the clergy of the Church of England. The cloud of revolution, which had been no bigger than a man's hand when the boy Robert was born, had gathered strength and broke over quiet Freshwater, where an 'intruding' Puritan was substituted for the rector, whose troubles came to an end by merciful death in 1648. In consequence of losing his father neither of the two plans was adopted. He was indeed placed for a time under the celebrated painter who afterwards bore the name of Sir Peter Lely. Happily for himself Hooke, who was reserved for better studies, found that he had neither the skill nor the health to follow the painter's art. Otherwise he might have become after the manner of his master Lely a painter of fine court ladies, who, in the fantastic costume of a night-gown fastened with a single pin are to be seen in Lely's tasteless portraits wandering over meadows or by running streams. Dr. Busby of Westminster School, who as a flogger of boys shares the reputation of a later schoolmaster, Dr. Keate of Eton, took young Hooke kindly into his own house. The stern disciplinarian grounded the boy well in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and other oriental tongues-too great a feast of languages for a youthful appetite. Hooke's line was not that of a classical scholar any more than that of a portrait painter. From Westminster he proceeded to Christchurch, Oxford, somewhere about 1653, and his name was entered on the books of that College, which has at all times been largely recruited by Westminster boys. At Oxford Puritanism was in the ascendent. The Earl of Pembroke, Governor of the Isle of Wight, and also Chancellor of the University, had in 1648 expelled all the heads of houses in Oxford, except the trimmer, Paul Hood of Lincoln College, and the somewhat puritanically inclined Gerard Langbaine, Provost of Queen's. The well-known Calvinistic theologian, John Owen, who had taken his degree at Queen's College, Oxford, in 1632, was by an order of Parliament promoted to the office of Dean of Christchurch, 1651, and in the following year he became Vice-Chancellor of the University-Cromwell being Chancellor. Owen, who was a man of far larger mind and of a more liberal spirit than most of his Puritan brethren, winked at the proceedings of a quiet knot of students of Nature and Nature's laws, who being members of the silenced Church of England had their own humble conventicle, where they were allowed to use the forbidden Prayer Book. This little group had begun, to use Dr. Whewell's striking expression, 'to knock at the door at which truth was to be found, though it was left for Newton to force it open.' We catch a pleasant glimpse of this small and select company engaged in the calm and peaceful pursuit of knowledge in the midst of all the fierce political party-strife and sectarian bigotry of that period. Not that they had selfishly retired to the halls of philosophy, away from the stir of practical life. Most of them had personal experience of the trials and losses which the uprooting of old institutions brings in its train. They were religious men, and also faithful students of science, who could pour the light of demonstration upon their discoveries. Science, or the systematized observation of Nature, had not then begun to despise religion, nor religion to fear science. What has been will be again. Already are signs on the horizon that devout Christian believers can observe and cross-question Nature with as keen perception and a far wider and broader comprehension of the problems suggested by outward appearances, both in the universe and in the course of human affairs, as those who, desiring to dispense with spiritual forces altogether, fail to trace any evidence of God's presence either in the creation or the history of the world. Some of these truth-seeking investigators at Oxford were clergymen ; John Wilkins, afterwards Bishop of Chester, and married to Robina, sister of Oliver Cromwell, was according to Anthony à Wood a noted theologist and preacher, a curious critic in several matters, an excellent mathematician and experimentist, and one well seen in mechanisms and new philosophy (of which he was a great promoter) as any of his time.' According to Whewell his works tended more than any others to the diffusion of the Copernican or heliocentric system in England. John Wallis, who, as a theologian, scholar, logician, and mathematician, presented in his person a singular union of originality and labour. Seth Ward, afterwards successively Bishop of Exeter and Salisbury, an astronomer, who invented an approximate method of solving Kepler's problem, still known as the simple elliptical hypothesis. Others were physicians; Francis Glisson, the discoverer of the prolongation of the cellular tissue of the liver, which is called 'Glisson's capsule,' and who was the first to discriminate muscular irritability as a peculiar power. Thomas Willis, who made important additions to the knowledge of the connexion of the parts of the brain, and carefully examined the different 'ganglions,' or knots which occur upon the nerves. Το these may be added Christopher Wren, a mathematician and astronomer, before he was an architect and reared St. Paul's, London, the monument of his genius, along with other stately city churches. Their club was afterwards joined by a young man of rank and wealth, the Honourable Robert Boyle, tall, slender, and emaciated, the 'Christian philosopher,' who, in the judgement of Hallam (Lit. Hist. iv. p. 341) was the most faithful, the most patient, the most successful disciple, who carried forward the experimental philosophy of Bacon.' This club, which Boyle calls in one of his letters our new philosophical or invisible college,' was the germ of that society which was afterwards, in 1662, incorporated by charter under the name of the Royal Society. The members of this club patronized the youthful deformed Oxonian, who had already shown evidence of his scientific ability. Faithful to his early love for clock-making, Hooke had made improvements in the construction of pendulum watches, in particular, the application of a spiral spring to regulate the balance. According to the writers on horology, or the art of measuring time, the honour of applying the pendulum to clock-work has been a subject of much contention, but Hooke, it is allowed, made valuable changes in this direction. At Oxford Hooke was engaged to assist Dr. Wallis in his chemical experiments, and afterwards served Boyle in a similar capacity. As Boyle's fellowlabourer, Hooke divined the theory of oxygen (which he called nitrous spirit') as the element of the atmosphere, employed in sustaining combustion and animal life, though the conclusion was not experimentally established. In 1662 he was appointed curator of experiments to the Royal Society, and in 1664 succeeded Dr. Dacres as professor of geometry at Gresham College. When, as Lord Macaulay writes, a fire such as had not been known in Europe since the conflagration of Rome by Nero laid in ruins the whole city of London from the Tower to the Temple, and from the river to the purlieus of Smithfield,' Hooke in 1666, after having produced a plan for re-building the city, received the appointment of city surveyor, from the emoluments of which office he subsequently acquired considerable wealth, which was found after his death in a large iron chest that had evidently not been opened for many years. In 1668 he had a controversy with Hevelius or Hevel, a Polish astronomer, who next to Flamsteed was among the men of his day the most diligent and accurate observer of the heavens. Hevel, who was a great authority upon comets, imagined that better observations could be made |