was just over thirty, and was immersed in a huge practice when he was thirty-five. But perhaps Wren also was too universal. Perhaps the very ingenuity of his mind led to distractions in too many directions. It may be, too, that his inclinations towards the practical fusion of art, science, and administration, which found full expression as an architect, had always tended to draw him away from the pursuit of abstract science. We may notice that even in the early days of Oxford he was always the demonstrator and the contriver of experiments at the meetings of the philosophers, and later, in the early history of the Royal Society, we find that it was to Wren that the Society continually turned for the solution of almost any problem that came under discussion. A letter he wrote to Lord Brouncker in 1663, as to an appropriate show when the King visited the Society, suggests he was already distrusting his own skill and pleasure in experiment. “_Sciographical Knacks_ (of which an hundred sorts may be given) are so easy in the invention, that now they are cheap.” The extracts from the Minute Books of the Royal Society show the confidence of its members in Wren’s universality of mind and constructive ability. At the second meeting of the Society on December 5, 1660, when Sir Robert Moray brought the King’s approval, “Mr. Wren was desired to prepare against the next meeting for the pendulum experiment.” A fortnight later the record states “that Dr. Petty and Mr. Wren were desired to consider the philosophy of shipping ... and that Mr. Wren bring in his account of the pendulum experiment.” Wren was at Oxford in the Spring of 1661, and things did not go well without him. On May 8 we find a resolution that a letter be sent him charging him in the King’s name to make a globe of the moon and likewise to continue the description of several insects that he had begun. Sir Robert Moray transmitted the royal command in a very affectionate letter. The moon was duly delivered to the King at Whitehall, who received it with great satisfaction. On September 4 there is reported some correspondence with Sir Kenelm Digby and Monsieur Frenicle concerning Wren’s hypothesis about Saturn’s rings. Later there is a letter of Wren’s which records that, although in 1658 he had made a model to illustrate his theory of Saturn’s rings, he had withdrawn this hypothesis as soon as he had learnt of Huygen’s more convincing explanation. On January 1, 1662, “Mr. Wren was requested to prosecute his design of trying by several round pasteboards their velocity in falling.” On the 8th Dr. Wren brought in a scheme of a weather-clock. On January 22 the pendulum experiment is described at length together with Lord Brouncker’s calculation of the velocity of fall, and at the same meeting it is recorded that “Dr. Wren showed his experiment of filling a vessel with water which emptied itself when filled at a certain height.”