dictionary in 1612, adopted for its device a sieve, with the motto: Il pici bel fior ne coglia; and the Lyncean used as their symbol, rain dropping from a cloud, with the motto: Redit aquiine dulci. The strange desire that was manifested to give many of these institutions, avowedly established for noble purposes, absurd names, was not long in meeting with appropriate ridicule.' The Academy della Crusca still assembles, to the present day, in the Palazzo Ricardi, for the formalities of holding meetings and granting diplomas. The backs of their arm-chairs are in the shape of winnowing shovels, the seats represent sacks; every member takes a name allusive to the miller's calling, and receives a grant of an estate, properly described by metes and bounds-in Arcadia. Italy appears beyond question to have been first in this revival of literature, art, and science. In other countries no records exist to shew the institution of any such academies or societies as those described. In England, indeed, a society of antiquaries-the antecedent, not the progenitor of the present society with that name-had been instituted. But a society with such objects in view could do little for the advancement of physical science; rather the contrary, for the science of the day was already only a learned and elaborate imitation of the science of the past. This society, as Mr Hallam informs us, was dissolved by James I. about the year 1604. About the middle of the seventeenth an academy was founded at Florence, which formed the first whose fundamental principle was, truth from experiment, not from authority. The name of this academy was Del Cimento. Its title, observes Mr Hallam in his introduction to the 'Literature of Europe,' gave promise of their fundamental rule the investigation of truth by experiment alone. The number of academicians was unlimited, and all that was required as an article of faith was the abjuration of all faith (in matters of philosophy), and a resolution to inquire into truth without regard to any previous sect of philosophy. This academy lasted, unfortunately, but ten years in its vigour. It was established at Florence in 1657 under the distinguished patronage of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II., and by desire of his brother Leopold. The latter became a cardinal, and was thus withdrawn from Florence; after this the Florentine academy dwindled away into insignificance. The records of its labours yet exist, and we may learn from them how fresh and valuable are the truths to which the finger of experimental philosophy points. The celebrated experiment on the compressibility of water was of their institution. They took a sphere of gold, which they filled with water, and then applied pressure to the fluid until it oozed out of the walls of the receptacle; and they thought that evidence was thus given that water was altogether incompressible. This result, though entirely erroneous, was creditable to these early philosophers. The inquiry had been conceived in a right spirit, and the failure must be ascribed rather to the imperfection of their instruments than to any defect in the principles of that philosophy at whose bidding the experiment was undertaken.

This experiment long passed for authority among subsequent philosophers, and has been repeated up to our own day in various treatises. It becomes interesting, therefore, to notice that it was one of the earliest results obtained in the childhood of experimental philosophy. Other experiments were instituted which proved the property of electrical substances, the universal gravity of bodies, &c. Its individual members also remarkably

distinguished themselves. Torricelli, who was one of them, has left a name as lasting as the beautiful truth he established. The engineers of the Grand Duke, requiring to make some pumps of forty or fifty feet long, were astonished that, though nature abhorred a vacuum, they were unable to raise water from this depth. Galileo, Torricelli's master, investigated this curious phenomenon; and though not clearly establishing the cause, he became convinced of its connection with atmospheric pressure, which he had discovered some time previously. Torricelli in 1643 experimented upon the same subject; and wishing to find in a more convenient manner the weight of the quantity of fluid which could be supported above its general level, thought of employing mercury in the place of water. He filled a glass tube, one end of which was hermetically closed, with this metal. Inverting it, he saw to his delight the column fall until it reached a height of only thirty inches or thereabouts. Such was the first barometer -the first fluid-measurer of the weight of a column of our atmosphere. To this day the vacuum left at the top of the barometric tube is known by its discoverer's name. Pascal some years afterwards employed the instrument thus discovered in a series of experiments upon atmospheric pressure carried on at different heights; and by observations of the rise and fall of the mercurial column, incontestably established the fact that the fluid was kept within the tube because pressed upon by an equivalent weight of thin air. It is curious that Galileo never thought of Torricelli's experiment; nor less curious that Torricelli never thought of Pascal's. It is, however, not an uncommon occurrence in science for one discoverer to develop an idea and for others to exhibit its actual results. This was a specimen of the ore, if so we may speak, which the mine fresh opened afforded, and into whose apparently exhaustless resources philosophers are now penetrating. How encouraging to those who advocated the new philosophy, who had cast aside traditional scientific knowledge, and applied themselves to the unfolding of the truths of the real and visible world! To what a rich future could they now look forward!

England, long behind Italy in the race, at length caught the spirit of the age, and endeavours were made to found a Royal Academy by King James, to be entitled the College of Honour. This was, however, chiefly an educational and antiquarian institution, and never appears to have attained a definite shape. The attempt was finally abandoned on the death of the king. About the year 1635 another effort was made for the establishment of a scientific institution under the patronage of Charles I. This also wore the character of an academy for the instruction of the sons of aristocracy. It was called Minerva's Museum. Its professors taught physiology, anatomy, physic, astronomy, mathematics, languages—' skill at all weapons, and wrestling; also riding, dancing, and behaviour.' This, too, together with similar institutions in Germany, passed away, leaving only a record of its existence, without any result from its operations. France was more fortunate, and about the same period the French Academy was established. It sprang from a small beginning. A little knot of literary men at Paris agreed to meet once a week for conversations and discussions, chiefly upon literary subjects. At these meetings authors used to communicate their works for the benefit of criticism. For three or four years they were kept up with great harmony and mutual satisfaction.

They at first consisted only of nine members. Richelieu hearing of the institution, patronised it, and proposed to incorporate it; and this, after some unwillingness on the part of the members, and opposition on that of the parliament, was finally done, and they became an incorporate body royally instituted. The name of French Academy was chosen after some deliberation. Their professed objects were at first purely literary, and their labours were confined to the purification of the French language from vulgar, technical, or ignorant usages, and to establish a fixed standard. As yet in Italy alone there existed an academy for the advancement of experimental and physical science. The French Academy of Sciences was not yet established. It can scarcely appear strange, after what has already been observed as to the philosophic temper of the period, that literature came to be rather an object for study and discussion than science. It was hard to disengage the minds of men from the past-to take them from books to nature-from the study to the laboratory. But the time was at hand when both in England and France institutions for the advancement of science were about to be founded-institutions contributing in no small degree to the furtherance and attainment of philosophic truth.

But let us take a step back, in order that we may approach the subject with a better acquaintance with the means which unquestionably combined to bring about the establishment of such associations, and the introduction of a new system of philosophy. Francis Bacon, living in the age of which we have written, dwelt like a prophet rather in the future than the present. 'In the midst of a rising career of professional, political, and literary effort, he was moulding and shaping his great work, "Novum Organon;" listening with an anxious ear to the remarks of the learned of his times; and at the height and maturity of his genius, when, possessing all the highest honours which talent and learning could give him in his native land, we find this "servant of posterity" committing to its slow but infallible tribunal a work which, in reference to science, has been universally pronounced the judgment of reason and experience, in this rare instance confirming the boastings of youth-the greatest birth of time.' This work was the gradual formation of a creating spirit. It was wrought up and polished with the sedulous industry of an artist who labours for posterity. Like the Analogy' of Butler, and all the greater productions of thought, the Organon' of Bacon was the result of painstaking labour spread through many years. He copied his work twelve times, revising, correcting, and altering it year by year, before it was reduced to that form in which it was committed to the press. On his sixtieth birthday, surrounded by earthly splendour, Bacon conceived the time for the publication of this work, which he constantly affirms to be only a part of a much larger and more important one. The Novum Organon' commences with these remarkable words: Francis of Verulam-thought thus.' It was shortly afterwards printed; copies of the work were sent to the king, the university of Cambridge, and elsewhere. But what was its reception? The king said it was past understanding; another said it was a book which a fool could not write, and a wise man would not. Under a device on the titlepage, of a ship passing the pillars of Hercules, Sir Edward Coke wrote:'It deserveth not to be read in schools,

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But to be freighted in the ship of fools.'

Yet by some in his own time Bacon was understood. Sir Henry Wotton wrote to him, on receiving the work, in the following terms:- Your lordship hath done a great and everliving benefit to all the children of nature, and to nature herself in her uttermost extent of latitude, who never had before so noble nor so true an interpreter, never so inward a secretary of her cabinet. And on the continent the book was received with favour by many who justly regarded it as one of the most important accessions ever made to philosophy. This work cannot be characterised in a few sentences. The guide-light to the whole is experiment in place of argument-the interpretation of real nature to the neglect of previous authorities. Bacon's grand object was to point out a new method of obtaining the knowledge of things, and to destroy the false notions, or, as he calls them, the Idols, which beset the human mind. Secure in the ultimate victory of truth, he was anxious to avoid a contentious philosophy. Alexander Borgia, he observed, said of the expedition of the French into Italy, 'that they came with chalk in their hands to mark up their lodgings, and not with weapons to force their passage. Even so do we wish our philosophy to make its way quietly into those minds that are fit for it, and of good capacity.' Bacon has been appropriately called the father of experimental and inductive philosophy, and it is in this aspect that we desire to represent him in these pages. Not that inductive philosophy, or indeed experimental investigation, had not existed prior to Bacon's era. All the first great founders of human philosophy were men who, by induction and experiment, arrived at most of the truths taught in their books. But in the lapse of time these men came to take the place of nature itself; induction and experiment were abandoned for the study of their books; and it was just when the age was thoroughly blinded with this false and erroneous system of study that Bacon arose an instrument in the Divine hand to break open again the sealed doors of nature, and to pour new light upon mankind.

The influence of Bacon's work remained long unfelt, but at length men began to inquire for themselves. The period was arrived when experimental philosophy, to which Bacon had held the torch, and which had already made considerable progress, especially in Italy, was finally established on the ruins of arbitrary figments and partial inductions.' England justly claims the honour of being the first country after Italy to establish a society for the investigation and advancement of physical science. The connection of Bacon's work with the origin and establishment of our own Royal Society appears in the following extract from the life of Dr Wallis, quoted in Mr Weld's recent history of that body:-'About the year 1645, while I lived in London, at a time when, by our civil wars, academical studies were much interrupted in both our universities, beside the conversation of divers eminent divines as to matters theological, I had the opportunity of being acquainted with divers worthy persons, inquisitive into natural philosophy and other parts of human learning, and particularly of what hath been called the New Philosophy, or Experimental Philosophy. We did by arguments divers of us, meet weekly in London on a certain day, to treat and discourse of such affairs; of which number were Dr John Wilkins, afterwards bishop of Chester, Dr Jonathan Goddard, Dr George Ent, &c. and many others. These meetings were held sometimes at Dr Goddard's lodgings in Wood Street, or some convenient place near, on

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occasion of his keeping an operator in his house for grinding glasses for telescopes and microscopes; sometimes at a convenient place in Cheapside; and sometimes at Gresham College, or some place near adjoining: our business was (precluding matters of theology and state affairs) to discourse and consider of philosophical inquiries, and such as related thereunto—such as physick, anatomy, geometry, astronomy, navigation, staticks, magneticks, chymicks, mechanicks, and natural experiments; with the state of these studies as then cultivated at home and abroad. We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the veins, the venoe lacteae, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape of Saturn, the spots in the sun, and its turning on its own axis, the inequalities and selenography of the moon, the several places of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes, and grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities, and nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies, and the degrees of acceleration therein; and divers other things of like nature; some of which were then new discoveries, and others not so generally known and imbraced as now they are, with other things appertaining to what hath been called the New Philosophy, which from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated in Italy, France, and Germany, and other parts abroad as well as with us in England.' Soon after, several influential members of this hopeful little association went to Oxford. Of these one of the most eminent was the learned, ingenious, and eccentric Bishop Wilkins. Of him Aubrey states that he was the principal reviver of experimental philosophy, after Bacon's system, at Oxford, where he had a weekly experimental club, which began in 1649, and was the nucleus from which the Royal Society was formed. Returning again to London, the Society continued its old meetings at Cheapside, and thence removed to Gresham College. The society at Oxford still met in the lodgings of a certain Dr Petty, who lived with an apothecary— 'because of the convenience of inspecting drugs, and the like.' The Oxford Society became ultimately a powerful auxiliary to the Royal Society; but after the year 1690 it was given up. After a time, the unsettled state of public affairs retarded the incorporation and permanent institution of the London Society. A great number of talented and inquiring men then existed in England: it appears to have been only the troubled condition of society that delayed their union and amalgamation into one body. This was, however, finally accomplished in the wonderful pacific year 1660. It was formed by Sir Robert Moray, Lord Brouncker, and Dr Ward. 'But he who laboured most,' says Bishop Burnet, at the greatest charge, and with the most success at experiments, was the Hon. Robert Boyle. He was a very devout Christian, humble and modest almost to a fault, of a most spotless and exemplary life in all respects. The society for philosophy grew so considerably, that they thought fit to take out a patent, which constituted them a body, by the name of the Royal Society. Soon after the French Academy of Sciences was formed, and was united with that already existing for literary studies. Thus, thirty-six years after the death of Lord Bacon, the first fruit of his great work was

gathered,