“As for us, poor earthworms, we are crawling in my house about our quondam back-kitchen, whereof my son hath made a goodly laboratory; yea, such a one, as men (who have had the favour and privilege to see or be admitted into it) affirm they have never seen the like for its several advantages and commodiousnesses. It hath been employed days and nights with no small success, God be praised, these many weeks together.”[187] London was labyrinthine: there was an undeniable fascination about Hartlib’s quondam back-kitchen; but Oxford beckoned. And so, at the age of twenty-seven, Robert Boyle went to Oxford; a student always, already known as a scholar and philosopher, one of the chief of the Invisibles,—a ready-made Don. CHAPTER XII OXFORD: A LEARNED JUNTO “... I see no cause to despair that, whether or no my writings be protected, the truths they hold forth will in time, in spite of opposition, establish themselves in the minds of men, as the circulation of the blood, and other, formerly much contested, truths have already done. My humour has naturally made me too careful not to offend those I dissent from, to make it necessary for any man to be my adversary upon the account of personal injuries or provocations. And as for any whom either judgment or envy may invite to contend, that the things I have communicated to the world deserved not so much applause as they have had the luck to be entertained with; that shall make no quarrel betwixt us: for perhaps I am myself as much of that mind as he; and however I shall not scruple to profess myself one of those who is more desirous to spend his time usefully, than to have the glory of leaving nothing that was ever written against himself unanswered; and who is more solicitous to pursue the ways of discovering truth than to have it thought that he never was so much subject to human frailties as to miss it.”—ROBERT BOYLE: Preface to _A Defence of the Doctrine touching the Spring and Weight of the Air_. Several of the original Philosophical Society had migrated to Oxford before Robert Boyle joined them there. Dr. Wilkins had been appointed Warden of Wadham at the _Visitation and Purgation_ of the University in 1648; Dr. Wallis, at the same time, had been made Savilian Professor of Geometry; and Dr. Goddard, of Wood Street celebrity, had become Warden of Merton. Robert Boyle does not seem to have been in Oxford during the _Encænia_ in July 1654. There is, at least, no mention of him in Evelyn’s description of “the civilities of Oxford” during that happy week; and the friendship between Boyle and Evelyn, that was to last “neare fourty yeares,” was not to begin till a little later. But Evelyn has described Oxford society exactly as it was when Robert Boyle entered it.