complacency would now be thought too trivial to engage the attention of a learned society, and some are not a little absurd. In the main, however, they are most significant of the new spirit that had come into the world. A counter spirit was necessarily called into being also. Sprat combats the objections of churchmen by proving that enthusiasts cannot be natural philosophers, and propitiates wits like Butler by promising them new ideas for their writings. His demonstration that the design of the society was in no respect prejudicial to the Church of England may raise a smile now, but was probably by no means superfluous at the time. His remarks upon the utility of experiments display the most vigorous common sense; he would evidently have subscribed heartily to a modern definition of a fool as 'a man who never made an experiment in his life.' 'If,' he says of the opponents of experimental philosophy, 'they will persist in contemning all experiments except those which bring with them immediate gain and a present harvest, they may as well cavil at the providence of God that he has not made all the seasons of the year to be times of mowing, reaping, and vintage.' He enumerates eleven classes of experiments actually instituted by the Royal Society, comprising a very large number of separate essays, one of which, it is to be feared, may not have perfectly succeeded, 'Of making a deaf and dumb man to speak.' His observations upon the prospects of human improvement, the advantages of transplantation and immigration, the national gain from encouraging inventors and projectors, are conceived in the same bold and liberal spirit, contrasting forcibly with his timid and time-serving politics. In his advocacy of the claims of London to rank as the metropolis of science, and his exhortations to the English gentry to turn the leisure and opportunity afforded by a country life to account for the study of nature, he becomes what he never is when writing verse--something bordering upon a poet. [Sidenote: Evelyn's _Sylva_, 1664.]