The rise of the experimental method in Oxford : being the ninth Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club on May 13, 1902 / by Clifford Allbutt.

  • Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The rise of the experimental method in Oxford : being the ninth Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club on May 13, 1902 / by Clifford Allbutt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    tion to think that the great mother was glad in them : and so in her own heart she may have been; but with the rest of her brood it was far otherwise. We see the Dean of Christ Church setting his poisoned traps for Locke, and tendering his servile offices to expel him. At the head of a gang of fops we see to our sorrow Hobbes, who had ‘ contracted a morosity,’ pursuing the Scientific Society and its members with rancorous and pedantic censures. Thomas Sprat had to argue that experiments are not dangerous to Universities. Not only did pert young priests ask sarcastically to what purpose it is to preach to people, and go about to save them without a telescope and a glass for fleas! but even South also, the Public Orator, fulminated against the Royal Society at the opening of the Sheldonian. Of the Wadham College Library Mr. Wells says that such a collection enables us to realize the main interests of a seventeenth- century scholar. ‘ Every variety of theology, historical, doctrinal, above all controversial, is represented fully. . . . Long-forgotten Jesuits from Spain or Poland stand in dusty oblivion side by side with their opponents. Hales and Aquinas are as eminent as Erasmus and Luther. Scholars from all parts of Europe met, armed with the common language, Latin, on the common battle- field, Theology.’ For this monstrous trifling, this solemn pyramid building, in the desert, over the ashes of ghosts, a sore night was at hand. In 1642 the King entered Oxford, the toga yielded to arms; the babble of the school was lost in the din of the fortress, and for four years science and letters held their breath in the crisis of the nation. Happily among the captains of both factions were men who had been suckled at the breast of the
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