Mr. Boyle, Mr. Boyle’s air-pump, and Mr. Boyle’s books—especially that on the _Spring and Weight of the Air_—were the talk of the Court as well as of the College. It is quite true that “the weighing of ayre” was, in those early days of the Society’s existence, its favourite occupation. A great change had come over the Philosophers. They found themselves invited into a kind of scientific _Kindergarten_, where knowledge was to be gained, not through their old black-letter books, but out of pots and pans and pendulums, and shining ores, and precious stones, and “anatomes” and “curiosities” and “things of nature.” And the most fascinating thing of nature at this moment—just because, perhaps, it was intangible, invisible, elusive—was “the ayre.” These men had discovered that “the ayre” possessed properties, obeyed laws; in fact, they had suddenly realized that they were all going about under an atmosphere. Mr. Boyle had shown it to be so; and there, in their midst, was the _machina Boyleana_. But there were other “transactions” of the infant Royal Society. In Oldenburg’s letters, and Hooke’s letters, and in the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, there are vivid contemporary glimpses of what went on at Gresham College. Poor old Hartlib was dead, and Oldenburg seems to have taken Hartlib’s place as Boyle’s London Correspondent. He gave Boyle the latest gossip, not only of “Our Society,” but of “State affairs” at home and abroad. From him Boyle, at Oxford, heard of the visits of distinguished foreigners—Huygens, Sorbière, and others—to Gresham College. Even when the attendances were “thin,” and there was not much being shown, these men were struck with admiration of “our experimental method,” our “sedate and friendly way of conference,” and “the gravity and majestickness of our order.” The indefatigable Secretary, overworked and underpaid as he undoubtedly was, and asking in vain for an “amanuensis,” had soon put himself in touch with experimentalists in France, Holland, Germany, Italy, the Bermudas, Poland, Sweden, New England, and the East Indies. A new governor of “Bombaia” had offered his services to the Society “for philosophical purposes”: “We have taken to taske the whole universe,” wrote Oldenburg to Governor Winthrop in Connecticut.