There was really no form of “curiosity” of earth, or sea, or sky, that was not grist to the Gresham College mill. Chariots and watches, masonry, ores, “the nature of salts,” injection into the veins and the transfusion of blood, the velocity of bullets, mine-damp, musical sounds and instruments, thermometers and barometers, fossils, shooting stars, and double keels were all mixed up in most admired disorder; and Mr. Boyle at Oxford was doing his best to interest the “Oxonians” in the work going on at Gresham College; he himself being equally interested in the experiments of transfusion of blood carried on in London and the “musical experiments” made under his direction in the Oxford colleges. Oldenburg reported everything to him, and Hooke, too, his old assistant, who was now curator of Our Society. Winthrop had written about the ores to be found in New England, and an enthusiastic young Londoner had been planting a “Virginian garden.” At one meeting of the Society there had been “a good store of discourse concerning star-shoots”; at another all the experiments were of “the descent of bodies in water.” On more than one occasion a party of the philosophers—Sir Robert Moray, Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Goddard, Hooke, and others—had climbed to the top of the steeple of St. Paul’s “to make the ‘Torricellian experiments’ of falling bodies and of pendulums.” And after the Correspondence Committee had met at Mr. Povy’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for the purpose of collecting evidence from “all parts of the world,” Oldenburg wrote to Boyle: “This was our entertainment above ground, I leave you to guess what our correspondence was underground in the grotto, and near the well, that is the conservatory of so many dozen of wine-bottles of all kinds.”[281] So the letters came and went between London and Oxford; and Boyle’s manuscripts and proof-sheets were sent to Oldenburg by coach or carrier, or by Boyle’s own servant. “These coachmen and carriers are incorrigible,” wrote Oldenburg, when parcels were charged double and letters went astray; and there was, in particular, a “she-porter” who specially annoyed Mr. Oldenburg. Presently, Mr. Sprat was writing the Society’s history—as far as it went; and Samuel Butler was satirising Gresham College up and down the town. Everybody knew that the King kept a copy of _Hudibras_ in his pocket: might not the young Society suffer from Butler’s sarcasm? The Secretary was ruffled and anxious; and he owned to Boyle that he could have done a good deal more in pushing and popularising certain investigations for the Society “if I had not been afraid of _Hudibras_.”[282] But while Hudibras was ridiculing the experimentalists, and Restoration-orthodoxy was shaking its head over the new philosophy, the Society had its votaries—a good many of them, it is true, on the other side of the channel.[283] If Butler made fun of the Philosophers—