Do people who are not scientifically employed ever realise the absorbing, baffling, fascinating work that goes on inside a chemical or a physical laboratory? The “painful patience in delays,” the “faithfulness in little things,” the flash of success, the hard wall of “negative result”? Who but the “Scepticall Chymist” himself understands the Spirit of his Research? “But it is scarce one day (or hour in the day) or night,” wrote Hartlib to Boyle, in 1659, “but my soul is crying out— “‘Phosphore! redde diem; quid gaudia nostra moraris. Phosphore! redde diem!’”[207] It was in this spirit that Robert Boyle worked in his Oxford laboratory, through the years of the Protectorate and on to the coming of Charles II. Slowly and laboriously, and very gently, careful not to offend those from whom he dissented, he amassed and examined evidences that were to break down the old mistaken notions of the Greek and mediæval philosophy, and to build up—a very little way, perhaps, but on a new and sure foundation—the mighty structure of physical and chemical science. Its golden keys were to be handed over to Isaac Newton and Dalton, and a long and brilliant line of workers in experimental science. What if Robert Boyle, in the seventeenth century, spoke of phosphorus as “nocte-luca” and of gaseous elasticity as “spring of the air?” Dr. Wilkins, of Wadham, was only then preparing his treatise on a _Real Character_.[208] As early as 1647, Boyle himself, then only twenty, wrote to Hartlib: “If the design of the _Real Character_ take effect, it will in good part make amends to mankind for what their pride lost them at the tower of Babel.”[209] But even Dr. Wilkins’s _Real Character_ would scarcely have been the vocabulary of to-day. Boyle’s Law, in whatever words he expressed it, remains incontrovertible.[210] What if he just missed the discovery of Hydrogen after actually collecting it in a receiver? The oversights of science are the inevitable dear companions of research. What if, after giving to science the definition of an element, as distinguished from a mixture or compound, he could not go further, with the means then at hand, by suggesting any one substance as elementary? None the less, he had realised and stated a great natural fact, founding thereby a new era in science. The “Elements” of the Ancients, that had terrified him in childhood, were to be broken up; their secrets were to be extorted from them, for the good of mankind. There is an echo of the old Genevan thunderstorm, and the older _Benedicite_, in Boerhaave’s eulogium of Boyle—“to him we owe the secrets of fire, air, water, animals, vegetables and frosts”; but in modern times, and in modern terms, Robert Boyle has had his recognition—