We may now follow out the more troublesome conflict, or rather series of conflicts, in which Hobbes became entangled from the time of publishing his _De corpore_ in 1655, and which checkered all his remaining years. In _Leviathan_ he had vehemently assailed the system of the universities, as originally founded for the support of the papal against the civil authority, and as still working social mischief by adherence to the old learning. The attack was duly noted at Oxford, where under the Commonwealth a new spirit of scientific activity had begun to stir. In 1654 Seth Ward (1617-1689), the Savilian professor of astronomy, replying in his _Vindiciae academiarum_ to some other assaults (especially against John Webster's _Examen of Academies_) on the academic system, retorted upon Hobbes that, so far from the universities being now what he had known them in his youth, he would find his geometrical pieces, when they appeared, better understood there than he should like. This was said in reference to the boasts in which Hobbes seems to have been freely indulging of having squared the circle and accomplished other such feats; and, when a year later the _De corpore_ (_L.W._ i.) finally appeared, it was seen how the thrust had gone home. In the chapter (xx.) of that work where Hobbes dealt with the famous problem whose solution he thought he had found, there were left expressions against Vindex (Ward) at a time when the solutions still seemed to him good; but the solutions themselves, as printed, were allowed to be all in different ways halting, as he naively confessed he had discovered only when he had been driven by the insults of malevolent men to examine them more closely with the help of his friends. A strange conclusion this, and reached by a path not less strange, as was now to be disclosed by a relentless hand. Ward's colleague, the more famous John Wallis (q.v.), Savilian professor of geometry from 1649, had been privy to the challenge thrown out in 1654, and it was arranged that they should critically dispose of the _De corpore_ between them. Ward was to occupy himself with the philosophical and physical sections, which he did in leisurely fashion, bringing out his criticism in the course of next year (_In Th. Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica_). Wallis was to confine himself to the mathematical chapters, and set to work at once with characteristic energy. Obtaining an unbound copy of the _De corpore_, he saw by the mutilated appearance of the sheets that Hobbes had repeatedly altered his demonstrations before he issued them at last in their actual form, grotesque as it was, rather than delay the book longer. Obtaining also a copy of the work as it had been printed before Hobbes had any doubt of the validity of his solutions, Wallis was able to track his whole course from the time of Ward's provocation--his passage from