Boyle recovered from his paralytic distemper, though very slowly. Whether it was the cordial of viper’s flesh, or the ministration of a warm human hand, he did regain strength, and was able once more to take up his work and resume his London life—always afterwards more or less the life of a studious invalid. “It has plainely astonish’d me,” says Evelyn, “to have seene him so often recover, when he has not been able to move, or bring his hand to his mouth: and indeede the contexture of his body, during the best of his health, appear’d to me so delicate, that I have frequently compar’d him to a chrystal or Venice glasse which, tho’ wrought never so thin and fine, being carefully set up, would outlive the harder metals of daily use: And he was with all as clear and candid: not a blemish or spot to tarnish his reputation.” The mere number of Boyle’s publications during these years is remarkable, even though much of the work for them had been done before, and had only to be arranged for publication. They dealt with the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy; the Origin and Virtue of Gems; Fire, Flame, and Effluviums; the Pressure of Solids and Fluids, and the Weighing of Water; the Properties of Sea Water, and its Distillation; the Mechanical Causes of Heat and Cold, Volatility and Precipitation and Corrosiveness; the Production of Tastes; the Hypothesis of Alkali and Acidum, and the effects of atmospheric conditions “even on men’s sickness and health.” And there was always the other _facet_ to Boyle’s intellectual nature. While he was writing of all these and other things, while he was wrapped up in Suspicions—about the hidden qualities of air, celestial magnets and attraction by suction, statical hygroscopes, laudanum, and air-bladders, and “quicksilver turning hot with gold,”—he was also deep in meditations of the “Excellence of Theology compared with Natural Philosophy.” Both had always seemed to him to be the “Objects of Men’s Study.” He held tenaciously to the “Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion”; and his theological treatises were to run parallel with his philosophical transactions.