them; they are never named there as dictators over men's reasons; nor is there any extraordinary reference to their judgments."* The Royal Society began to publish the most important of the papers communicated to it, under the title of the Philosophical Transactions, in March, 1665; and the work has been continued from that date to the present day, with the exception of the four years from January, 1679, to January, 1683 (for which space the deficiency is partly supplied by Hooke's volume of Philosophical Collections), of the three years and a month from December, 1687, to January, 1691, and of various shorter intervals, amounting in all to nearly a year and a half more, previous to October, 1695. From this work, or either of its abridgments-the first, begun by Mr. Lowthorp and brought down by a succession of continuators to the middle of last century; the second, and best, by the late Dr. Charles Hutton and assistants, extending to the year 1800-and from the histories of Bishop Spratt and Dr. Birch, the former, however, coming down only to the year 1667, in which it was published – may be learned the general character of the inquiries with which the Royal Society occupied itself in the earlier stage of its existence, and which, we may hence infer, formed the kind of science at that time chiefly cultivated in this country. It will be found that mathematical and analytical investigations then bore an extremely small proportion to the bulk of the business at the Society's meetings; which, indeed, did not consist much of mere speculation of any kind, but rather of exhibitions and experiments, of details as to the useful arts, accounts of new inventions, communications of remarkable facts, phenomena, and incidents in natural history, chemistry, medicine, and anatomy,—of a great deal, in truth, that would now probably be accounted to belong only to the curiosities or popular pastimes of science. A list drawn up 30th March, 1664, presents the members as then distributed into the following seven committees (besides an eighth for correspondence): 1. Mechanical, to consider and improve all mechanical inventions; 2. Astronomical and Optical; 3. Anatomical; 4. Chemical; 5. Georgical; 6. For Histories of Trades; 7. For collecting all the Phenomena of Nature hitherto observed, and all experiments made and recorded. Here we have no mention at all of either mathematical or algebraical science; the cultivation of these branches sepa+ Birch, i. 406, 407. *Observations, p. 165. rately, or for their own sake, does not seem to have then been considered as coming within the design of the Society. Nor were they extensively applied even in mechanical, astronomical, and optical investigations. If we take up the first volume of Hutton's abridgment of the Philosophical Transactions, which comprises the first seven volumes of the original publication, extending over seven years, from 1665 to 1672 inclusive, we shall find that of about 450 communications (besides nearly 200 reviews of books), only nine come under the heads of algebra and geometry, or pure science; that of about 140 relating to mechanical philosophy, and arranged under the heads of dynamics, astronomy, chronology, navigation, gunnery, hydraulics, pneumatics, optics, electricity, magnetism, pyrotechny, thermometry, etc., nine in every ten are mere accounts of observations and experiments, or explanations and hypotheses in which there is little or no mathematics; and that the remaining 300, or two-thirds of the whole, belong to the departments of natural history (divided into zoology, botany, mineralogy, geography, and hydrology), of chemical philosophy (divided into chemistry, meteorology, and geology), of physiology (divided into physiology of animals, physiology of plants, medicine, surgery, and anatomy), and of the arts (divided into mechanical, chemical, and the fine arts).* So that at this time only about one paper in fifty was purely mathematical or analytical, and only one in three on subjects to which the science of lines and quantities was applicable-for chemistry was not yet in a condition to be treated otherwise than tentatively, and, if mathematical reasoning had been attempted in medicine, the attempt was a failure and a folly. The history of the Royal Society, however, is very nearly the whole history of English science, both physical and mathematical, from the date of its institution to the end of the seventeenth century. Almost all the scientific discoveries and improvements that originated in this country during that century were made by its members, and a large proportion of them are recorded and were first published in its Transactions. But the Royal Society, it is to be remembered, was, after all, still more an effect than a cause, still more an indication than a power; and, although it no doubt gave an impulse to the progress of science by the communication and union which it helped to maintain among the * In Hutton's table of contents a few papers are repeated under different heads, but this cannot much affect the calculation. labourers in that field, by some advantages which it derived from its position, and by the spirit which it excited and diffused, the advance which was made under its auspices, or partly by force of its example, would probably have been accomplished little less rapidly without its assistance; for the time was come, and the men with it, who assuredly would not have been hindered from doing their work, although such an institution had never been called into existence. But it was part of the work they were sent to do to establish such an institution, which, although not the tree on which science grows, is both a convenient and ornamental shelter for the gathered fruit, and,may be made serviceable for various subsidiary purposes which even philosophers are entitled to hold in some regard in a refined and luxurious age. THE STEAM-ENGINE. One invention, dating after the Restoration, of which much has been said in recent times, is assigned to an individual whose name does not occur in the roll of the members of the Royal Society-the first Steam-Engine, which is commonly believed to have been both described and constructed by the Marquess of Worcester—the same whose negociations with the Irish Catholics, when he was Earl of Glamorgan, make so remarkable a passage in the history of the contest between Charles I. and the parliament. The Marquess of Worcester's famous publication entitled A Century of the names and scantlings of such Inventions as at present I can call to mind to have tried and perfected (my former notes being lost), etc., was first printed in 1663. "It is a very small piece," says Walpole, " containing a dedication to Charles II.; another to both Houses of Parliament, in which he affirms having in the presence of Charles I. performed many of the feats mentioned in his book; a table of contents; and the work itself, which is but a table of contents neither, being a list of a hundred projects, most of them impossibilities, but all of which he affirms having discovered the art of performing. Some of the easiest seem to be, how to write with a single line; with a point; how to use all the senses indifferently for each other, as, to talk by colours, and to read by the taste; to make an unsinkable ship; how to do and to prevent the same thing; how to sail against wind and tide; how to form an universal character; how to con verse by jangling bells out of tune; how to take towns or prevent their being taken; how to write in the dark; how to cheat with dice; and, in short, how to fly." "Of all these wonderful inventions," adds Walpole, "the last but one seems the only one of which his lordship has left the secret ;" but the wit, who characterises the whole production as "an amazing piece of folly," has missed the most interesting of all the marquess's projects, the sixty-eighth in the list, which he entitles "An admirable and most forcible way to drive up water by fire," and which appears from his description to have been, in fact, a species of steamengine. His language implies, too, that the idea had been actually carried into effect: he speaks of having made use of a cannon for his boiler; and he says, "I have seen the water run like a constant fountain-stream forty feet high; one vessel of water rarefied by fire driveth up forty of cold water." And Sorbiere, when here in 1663, appears to have seen the engine at work-although the superficial, chattering Frenchman has described it, and probably understood it, so imperfectly as to have taken no note even of the nature of the power by which it was made to act:--" One of the most curious things I had a mind to see," he writes, "was a water-engine invented by the Marquess of Worcester, of which he had made an experiment. I went on purpose to see it at Fox Hall (Vauxhall), on the other side of the Thames, a little above Lambeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury's palace, standing in sight of London. One man by the help of this machine, raised four large buckets full of water in an instant forty feet high, and that through a pipe of about eight inches long; which invention will be of greater use to the public than that very ingenious machine already made use of, and raised upon wooden work above Somerset House, that supplies part of the town with water, but with great difficulty, and in less quantity than could be wished."† Forty years before the publication of the Century of Inventions, it is to be observed, a French engineer, Solomon de Caus, in a volume published at Paris entitled Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes, had not only called attention to the power of steam Royal and Noble Authors. Not to be confounded with another work entitled Traité des Forces Mouvantes; par Mons. de Camus, Gentilhomme Lorrain;" 8vo. Paris, 1722; in which, although of so much later date, steam as a moving power does not appear to be mentioned. produced in a close vessel, but had proposed a mode of raising water by means of such a force, the principle of which, as far as can be collected, appears to have been the same with that of the Marquess of Worcester's contrivance. It is possible that the marquess may have taken the idea from this book, which would be the more likely to attract attention in England from the circumstance of De Caus having come over to this country in 1612 in the train of the Elector Palatine, and resided here for some years; but still the English nobleman remains, as far as is known, the first person who ever actually constructed a steamengine, supposing the water-engine seen by Sorbiere to have been such. Twenty years later, as appears from the author's manuscript now in the British Museum, the same idea that had been already published by De Caus, and realised by the Marquess of Worcester, was proposed as his own by Sir Samuel Morland in a work on machines for raising water, written in French, and addressed to Louis XIV.;* although the passage was omitted from the book when it was soon afterwards sent to the press. About 1690, Denis Papin, a native of France, but then and for a great part of his life resident in this country, discovered and applied the two important improvements of making the expansive force of the steam act by means of a piston and of producing a reaction of the piston through the condensation of the steam by means of cold; he is also the inventor of the safety-valve, which, however, he only applied in the cooking apparatus called his digester, where steam was employed merely to produce heat, not in any machine where that agent was the moving power. In 1698 Captain Savery contrived the first steam-engine which can be said to have been found practically useful; he employed the principle of the condensation of the steam by cold, not to permit the relapse of a piston, as Papin had done, but to effect the elevation of the water directly by allowing it to ascend into the vacuum so produced. From this date steam may be considered to have ranked as an important working power in this country, although Savery's engine was never applied to any other purpose except the raising of water, which, too, it could only effect from a very inconsiderable depth, the vacuum, by means of which it principally operated, ceasing to act as soon as the column of water came to balance an atmospheric column of the same base, in other words, as soon as the water had ascended through the *Recueil de Machines pour l'Elévation des Eaux, &c. |