Nuts to crack; or Quips, quirks, anecdote and facete of Oxford and Cambridge ScholarsGooch, Richard
History
Nuts to crack; or Quips, quirks, anecdote and facete of Oxford and Cambridge Scholars
Gooch, Richard
University of Cambridge -- Anecdotes; University of Oxford -- Anecdotes
* * * * *
GAME IN EVERY BUSH.
Bishop Watson says, in his valuable Chemical Essays, that Sir Isaac
Newton and Dr. Bentley met accidentally in London, and on Sir Isaac's
inquiring what philosophical _pursuits_ were carrying on at Cambridge,
the doctor replied, "None; for when you are a-hunting, Sir Isaac, you
kill all the game; you have left us nothing to pursue." "Not so," said
the philosopher, "you may start a variety of game in every bush, if
you will but take the trouble to beat it." "And so in truth it is,"
adds Dr. W.; "every object in nature affords occasion for
philosophical experiment."
* * * * *
NEWTON'S TOAST.
The Editor of the Literary Panorama, says Corneille Le Bruyer, the
famous Dutch painter, relates, that "happening one day to dine at the
table of Newton, with other foreigners, when the dessert was sent up,
Newton proposed, 'a health to the men of every country who believed in
a God;' which," says the editor, "was drinking the health of the whole
human race." Equal to this was
THE PIETY OF RAY,
The celebrated naturalist and divine, who (when ejected from his
fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge, for _non-conformity_, and,
for the same reason, being no longer at liberty to exercise his
clerical functions as a preacher of the Gospel,) turned to the pursuit
of the sciences of natural philosophy and botany for consolation.
"Because I could no longer serve God in the church," said this great
and good man (in his Preface to the Wisdom of God manifested in the
Works of the Creation,) "I thought myself more bound to do it by my
writings."
* * * * *
THE DEVIL LOOKING OVER LINCOLN.
Is a tradition of many ages' standing, but the origin of the
celebrated statue of his Satanic Majesty, which of erst overlooked
Lincoln College, Oxford, is not so certain as that the effigy was
popular, and gave rise to the saying. After outstanding centuries of
hot and cold, jibes and jeers, "_cum multis aliis_," to which _stone_,
as well as flesh, is heir, it was taken down on the 15th of November,
1731, says a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, having lost its head
in a storm about two years previously, at the same time the head was
blown off the statue of King Charles the First, which overlooked
Whitehall.
* * * * *
RADCLIFFE'S LIBRARY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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