The Hon. Robert Boyle (1627–91), physicist, fourteenth child of the first Earl of Cork, was born at Lismore Castle in Munster, and after studying at Eton, and under the rector of Stalbridge, Dorset, went to the Continent for six years. On his return in 1644, he found himself in possession, by his father’s death, of the manor of Stalbridge, where he devoted himself to chemistry and natural philosophy. He was one of the first members of the association (1645) which became the Royal Society. Settling at Oxford in 1654, he experimented in pneumatics, and improved the air-pump. As a director of the East India Company (for which he had procured the Charter) he worked for the propagation of Christianity in the East, circulated at his own expense translations of the Scriptures, and by bequest founded the “Boyle Lectures” in defence of Christianity. In 1668 he took up residence in London with his sister, Lady Ranelagh, and gave much of his time to the Royal Society. In 1688 he shut himself up, in order to repair the loss caused by the accidental destruction of his MSS. He believed in the possibility of some of the alchemistic transmutations; but has justly been termed the true precursor of the modern chemist. He discovered “Mariotte’s law” seven years before Mariotte. His complete works (with his correspondence and a Life by Dr. Birch) were published in 5 vols. fol. (1744).

Personal

  He is very tall (about six foot high) and streight, very temperate, and vertuouse, and frugall: a batcheler; keepes a coach; sojournes with his sister, the lady Ranulagh. His greatest delight is chymistrey. He haz at his sister’s a noble laboratory, and severall servants (prentices to him) to looke to it. He is charitable to ingeniose men that are in want, and foreigne chymists have had large proofe of his bountie, for he will not spare for cost to gett any rare secret. At his owne costs and chardges he gott translated and printed the New Testament in Arabique, to send into the Mahometan countreys. He has not only a high renowne in England, but abroad; and when foreigners come to hither, ’tis one of their curiosities to make him a visit.

  At the funeral of Mr. Boyle at St. Martin’s, Dr. Burnet, Bp. of Salisbury, preach’d on 2 Eccles. v. 26. He concluded with an eulogy due to the deceas’d, who made God and Religion the scope of all his excellent tallents in the knowledge of nature, and who had arriv’d to so high a degree in it, accompanied with such zeale and extraordinary piety, w^ch he shoew’d in the whole course of his life, particularly in his exemplary charity on all occasions…. He dilated on his learning in Hebrew and Greek, his reading of the Fathers, and solid knowledge in theology, once deliberating about taking holy orders, and that at the time of the restoration of K. Cha. 2, when he might have made a greate figure in the nation as to secular honour and titles, his fear of not being able to discharge so weighty a duty as the first, made him decline that, and his humility the other. He spake of his civility to strangers, the greate good which he did by his experience in medicine and chemistry, and to what noble ends he applied himself to his darling studies; the works both pious and useful, which he publish’d; the exact life he led, and the happy end he made.

  He was looked upon by all who knew him as a very perfect pattern. He was a very devout Christian; humble and modest, almost to a fault; of a most spotless and exemplary life in all respects. He was highly charitable, and was a mortified and self-denied man that delighted in nothing so much as doing good.

  Mr. Boyle, was tall of stature, but slender, and his countenance pale and emaciated. His constitution was so tender and delicate that he had divers sorts of cloaks to put on when he went abroad, according to the temperature of the air, and in this he governed himself by his thermometer. He escaped, indeed, the small-pox, during his life, but for almost forty years he laboured under such a feebleness of body and lowness of strength and spirits that it was astonishing how he could read meditate, try experiments, and write as he did. He had likewise a weakness in his eyes, which made him very tender of them, and extremely apprehensive of such distempers as might affect them.

  We are at a loss which to admire most, his extensive knowledge, or his exalted piety. These excellences kept pace with each other: but the former never carried him to vanity, nor the latter to enthusiasm. He was himself The Christian virtuoso which he has described. Religion never sat more easy upon a man, nor added greater dignity to a character. He particularly applied himself to chymistry; and made such discoveries in that branch of science, as can scarce be credited upon less authority than his own.

  Mr. Boyle, the glory of his age and nation…. To the accomplishments of a scholar and a gentleman, he added the most exalted piety, the purest sanctity of manners. His unbounded munificence was extended to the noblest, and most honourable purposes,… the advancement of true religion, in almost all parts of the world. A firm friend to the church of England, he was one of her brightest ornaments. So long as goodness, learning, and charity, are held in estimation, the name of BOYLE will be revered.

  Eton can point to Robert Boyle as one of the purest and the best, as well as one of the most renowned of her sons.

  There are many other philosophers, ancient and modern, with whom we have taken similar pains; but Boyle is the most admirable character we have met with in the whole range of philosophy, science, and literature; and if instead of being born in Ireland he had been a Hindoo, a Laplander, or an African, we would have sought to do him equal justice, and to prove that wherever his ancestors were born, whether they were persons who threw down mass-houses or “transplanted multitudes of barbarous septs” from their own soil into “the wilds and deserts,” he was not a degenerate son, but far nobler than any of his ancestors—vastly superior to any “great Earl” that ever oppressed a generous people.

  His services to science were unique. The condition of his birth, the elevation of his character, the unflagging enthusiasm of his researches, combined to lend dignity and currency to their results. These were coextensive with the whole range, then accessible, of experimented investigation. He personified, it might be said, in a manner at once impressive and conciliatory, the victorious revolt against scientific dogmatism then in progress. Hence his unrivalled popularity and privileged position, which even the most rancorous felt compelled to respect. No stranger of note visited England without seeking an interview, which he regarded it as an obligation of christian charity to grant. Three successive kings of England conversed familiarly with him, and he was considered to have inherited, nay outshone, the fame of the great Verulam.

General

  The excellent Mr. Boyle was the person who seems to have been designed by nature to succeed to the labours and inquiries of that extraordinary genius I have just mentioned (Bacon). By innumerable experiments, he in a great measure filled up those plans and outlines of science, which his predecessor had sketched out. His life was spent in the pursuit of nature through a great variety of forms and changes, and in the most rational as well as devout adoration of its Divine Author.

  Here was a noble soul; a true philosophical mind, well seasoned with humanity, beneficence, and goodness. After he had led us through all the regions of nature, considered her various productions, showed us their uses and the manner of converting them to our several purposes, convinced us that we live in a world most wisely contrived wherein numberless good designs are at once carried on with unceasing variety and manifested that all the beings and all the bodies we know jointly conspire, as one whole, in bringing about the great ends of nature.

  Perhaps Mr. Boyle may be considered as the first person, neither connected with pharmacy nor mining, who devoted a considerable degree of attention to chemical pursuits. Mr. Boyle, though, in common with the literary men of his age, he may be accused of credulity, was both very laborious and intelligent; and his chemical pursuits, which were various and extensive, and intended solely to develop the truth without any regard to previously conceived opinions, contributed essentially to set chemistry free from the trammels of absurdity and superstition in which it had been hitherto enveloped, and to recommend it to philosophers as a science deserving to be studied on account of the important information which it was qualified to convey. His refutation of the alchemistical opinions respecting the constituents of bodies, his observations on cold, on the air, on phosphorus, and on ether, deserve particularly to be mentioned as doing him much honor. We have no regular account of any one substance or of any class of bodies in Mr. Boyle, similar to those which at present are considered as belonging exclusively to the science of chemistry. Neither did he attempt to systematize the phenomena, nor to subject them to any hypothetical explanation.

  To Boyle the world is indebted, besides some very acute remarks and many fine illustrations of his own upon metaphysical questions of the highest moment, for the philosophical arguments in defence of religion, which have added so much lustre to the names of Derham and Bentley; and, far above both, to that of Clarke…. I do not recollect to have seen it anywhere noticed, that some of the most striking and beautiful instances of design in the order of the material world, which occur in the sermons preached at Boyle’s Lecture, are borrowed from the works of the founder.

  The peculiar merits of Robert Boyle, have, in later times, been more praised, than known: canonized, rather, by the discerning few, than justly estimated, by the unreflecting many. His works, indeed, still occupy a space, though seldom frequented, in the collections of the learned.

  The metaphysical treatises, to use that word in a large sense, of Boyle, or rather those concerning Natural Theology, are very perspicuous, very free from system, and such as bespeak an independent lover of truth. His “Disquisition on Final Causes” was a well-timed vindication of that palmary argument against the paradox of the Cartesians, who had denied the validity of an inference from the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the universe to an intelligent Providence. Boyle takes a more philosophical view of the principle of final causes than had been found in many theologians, who weakened the argument itself by the presumptuous hypothesis, that man was the sole object of Providence in the creation. His greater knowledge of physiology led him to perceive, that there are both animal and what he calls cosmical ends, in which man has no concern.

  The value of his contributions to the cause of science, to the province of Natural Philosophy especially, cannot be too highly esteemed. More than two-thirds of his works are composed of the results of his investigations in Pneumatics, Chemistry, Medicine, and kindred subjects. The philosophers of the day and of succeeding times acknowledge their obligations to Boyle in the strongest terms. What a splendid eulogy is that of the great Boerhaave! “Mr. Boyle, the ornament of his age and country, succeeded to the genius and enquiries of the great Chancellor Verulam. Which of all Mr. Boyle’s writings shall I recommend? All of them! To him we owe the secrets of fire, air, water, animals, vegetables, fossils: so that from his works may be deduced the whole system of natural knowledge.”

  After the death of Bacon, one of the most distinguished Englishmen was certainly Boyle, who, if compared with his contemporaries, may be said to rank immediately below Newton, though, of course, very inferior to him as an original thinker. With the additions he made to our knowledge we are not immediately concerned; but it may be mentioned that he was the first who instituted exact experiments into the relation between colour and heat…. It is also to Boyle, more than to any other Englishman, that we owe the science of hydrostatics, in the state in which we now possess it. He is the original discoverer of that beautiful law, so fertile in valuable results, according to which the elasticity of air varies as its density. And, in the opinion of the most eminent modern naturalists, (Cuvier) it was Boyle who opened up those chemical inquiries, which went on accumulating until, a century later, they supplied the means by which Lavoisier and his contemporaries fixed the real basis of chemistry, and enabled it for the first time to take its proper stand among those sciences that deal with the external world.

  In Robert Boyle the fresh study of nature quickened love of God; his scientific thought was blended with simple and deep religious feeling.

  Enjoyed in the reign of Charles II. the same European reputation which Bacon had possessed in that of James I. He wrote on so many subjects, and some of them so trifling, that Swift made fun of him in his “Meditation on a Broomstick;” and his “New Philosophy,” his trimming system of natural religion, has gone the way of all intellectual makeshifts. But in the field of physics he was on safer ground, and some of his chemical and pneumatical discoveries have proved of lasting value. His style is wearisome and without elevation. Cudworth, who urged him to translate his voluminous treatises into Latin and destroy the originals, may possibly have been ironical as well as pedantic in so advising.

  We find in them still the note of impatience of form: he had not time to be brief. There is scarce a trace in him of the first quality of an artist in prose, rejection. Now and again a well-turned phrase strikes the reader, but, given a certain condition of language, the phrase is found to be that which would have occurred at once to a certain order of intellect. Happily for Boyle the English of his time was comparatively free from the more vulgar sort of stereotyped phrase; but still a full and sonorous tone. But from the greater masters of sonorous English, Boyle was as far removed as from the clear-cut simplicity and directness of Swift. His style is not involved, and is not affected; it is merely rarified and verbose. In his religious writings the same thing is noticeable as in his scientific. Here again he was deeply interested in his subject, a sincerely pious man applying his best powers, or trying so to do, to the subject he deemed of first importance. And here again he is essentially impatient of form; his sincerity gave him an infrequent warmth of phrase, the general and vague nature of his reflections an occasional rotundity, but again the average is jejune…. His attainments as a scholar, while they impelled him to attempt a literary form for his thoughts and discoveries, were not strong enough in the balance of his mind to compel the sacrifices necessary to an artistic result.

  An admirable natural philosopher, but feeble and diffuse as a natural theologian.