villa near Florence. When he made his formal submission with the reservation 'e pur si muove,' he was no doubt well aware that though he might consent to keep silence, his ideas were already in the air; truth had germinated in many minds and was bound to come to the surface.

Minds were stirring, new ground was being broken up every day, new views were gaining acceptance, and no authority could stamp them out. Every one was talking of the Laws of the German astronomer Kepler, which he had partly founded on the discoveries of the Dane Tycho Brahe. In England the labours of Bacon-who had something else to do than write Shakespeare's plays— had completely reconstructed the whole body of natural science. His Novum Organum, in which he 'took all 'knowledge for his province,' was laying deep in men's minds a conception of the universe founded solidly on observation and experiment, on laws deduced from knowledge, instead of on groups of facts forced into conformity with unproven dogma, and on the lines thus laid down has arisen the complete structure of Natural Philosophy as the modern world knows it.

Sir Kenelm Digby stands well for the type of man between the scientist and the layman; over-rated in his own day, under-rated probably since, he did no little to popularise the great discoveries of others. It has been asserted that he 'gave form and birth to many of Bacon's mighty conceptions,' but this would claim too much for him; he may have talked of them, written of them, brought them down within the ken of the average man, but great discoveries were not for his fly-away brains; he was an intelligent dabbler, keenly interested in scientific discovery, and quick to follow new trains of thought. Certainly in his person science and superstition met as they did in his age. We find him at one moment discoursing with Galileo of the motions of the heavenly bodies or of the grand theories of Lord Bacon; at another he is

entering in his precious book of recipes the secret of the Sympathetic Salve, which he had from a Carmelite monk who came from the Indies and Persia, and having refused to divulge it to the Grand Duke of Florence, imparted to Sir Kenelm in gratitude for some service rendered.1 The recipe exists in the Ashmole MS., and is entitled :—

6

'TO MAKE A SALVE YT HEALETH THOUGH A MAN 'BE THIRTY MILES OFF.

'Take mosse of a ded man's hed 2 onc., man's greace I onc., mummia, man's blood of each half an onc., ' linseed oyle 22 onc., oyle of roses, bolearminick of each an onc., bet them together in a mortar till it be fine 'leeke an oyntment, keep it in a box; and when any 'occasion is to use it, take the weapon wherewith a man 'is wounded, or for want thereof take another iron or 'peace of wood and put it in the wound, and so far as it 'is bloody anoynt it with that salfe.'

The recipe for the famous Venice Treacle which Sir Ralph Verney bought when he was in Italy and despatched to his aunt Mrs. Isham, and which is also mentioned by Evelyn, is worthy of a place beside this.2 'Hee that is 'most famous for treacle,' notes Sir Ralph, 'is called Signor Antonio Sgobis, and keepes a Shopp at the 'Strazzo Or Ostridge, sopre il ponte de' Barreteri, on the ' right hand going to St. Mark's. His price is 19 livres ' (Venize money) a pound, and hee gives little leaden potts 'with the Ostridge sign uppon them and papers both in Italian and Lattin to shew its virtue.' According to tradition, this wonderful concoction was composed by Nero's physician, and was made of vipers steeped alive in white wine, opium, spices from both the Indies, liquorice, red roses, germander tops, juice of rough sloes, seeds of treacle mustard, tops of St. John's wort and some twenty 2 Verney Memoirs.

1 Life of Sir Kenelm Digby.

other herbs, to be mixed with honey, triple the weight of all the dry species, into an electuary. The recipe is given in Dr. Quincey's English Dispensary, published in 1739.

Personal acquaintance with Galileo did not prevent Sir Kenelm Digby, like many another learned man of his day, having a profound faith in the occult systems of Astrology, nor from consulting the great Astrologer Lilly, and having his horoscope carefully cast. We smile now at the apparent childishness; yet perhaps after all the men of that day had a wider grasp of verities than had the materialists who succeeded them. These last were bounded by the things they could see, hear, touch, measure with instruments of great yet not unlimited power, and beyond those limits they acknowledged nothing but a blank. It may have been childish to assume that man's little life was written in the stars, yet behind these futile calculations of the astrologers lay the perception that man's fate was governed by the same laws that ordered the planets in their courses; the working of God's ordinances that kept the heavenly bodies true to their unchanging march ordered no less the fall of the sparrow and the end of man's little day.

Sir Kenelm's credulity included the easy acceptance of all manner of unexamined marvels which show him to have had at any rate a very unscientific habit of mind; in Lady Fanshawe's Memoirs an absurd story of him is related :-'When we came to Calais, we met the Earl of Strafford and Sir Kenelm Digby, with some others of ' our countrymen. We were feasted at the Governor's of 'the Castle, and much excellent discourse passed; but, as was reason, most share was Sir Kenelm Digby's, who 'had enlarged somewhat more in extraordinary stories. 'than might be averred, and all of them passed with great applause and wonder of the French then at table; but

'the concluding one was that barnacles, a bird in Jersey, was first a shell-fish to appearance, and from that, sticking upon old wood, became in time a bird.

After some

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'consideration, they unanimously burst into laughter, believing it altogether false; and, to say the truth, it was the only thing true he discoursed with them that was his infirmity, though otherwise a person of most 'excellent parts, and a very fine-bred gentleman.'

'The Pliny of our age for lying,' as one of his contemporaries called him, it was always his hap to be believed when he romanced, and laughed at when he spoke the sober verity. Lady Fanshawe and many others accepted the barnacle story in all good faith; but there was another wonderful story that found no credence which later investigation proved literally true. When travelling in Barbary he discovered a petrified city, and his description of it was received with a scoffing incredulity; but nearly a century later it obtained a striking confirmation: a paper was read before the Royal Society by Mr. Baker, English Consul at Tripoli, who said that about forty days' journey S.E. from Tripoli, and seven from the sea coast, there existed, at a place called Ongila, a petrified town of which the description tallied exactly with that of Sir Kenelm Digby. He was a great traveller, and from all his journeys brought back all manner of curiosities and travellers' tales; not long after his marriage, when one would have expected the claims of home to have been paramount, he fitted out and commanded a kind of privateering expedition to Scanderoon and the East; and later he travelled a good deal in Germany, at that time much less familiar to Englishmen than Italy or Spain.

Clever as he was, he certainly did not fulfil the high expectations formed of him by his Oxford tutor, the learned Alleyne. Perhaps his studies were too many and too varied for depth. He studied Philosophy at Oxford, Paris, Florence, and under many great savants, yet never attained the true philosophic temper; he was 'rather curious, showy, broad - minded than profound.' John Evelyn called him frankly a charlatan; his biographer and descendant, with sympathetic insight, has more