The cardinal event of that period was the institution of the Royal Society in 1660, the year of the Restoration. The most conspicuous bent of the intellectual world was in the direction of physical science, and ‘the great work of interpreting nature was performed by the English of that age as it had never before been performed in any age by any nation[7].’ This was the period in which a national Observatory was established at Greenwich (1676). To this period belong the chemical discoveries of Boyle, the botanical researches of Sloane, and the classifications of Ray. In every department of knowledge enquiry was roused, and with it the genius of theory, whose movements were sometimes hasty and erratic. But this tendency was gradually counteracted by the deepening conviction that sound knowledge must be based on careful observation, and the need of museums began to be recognized. The Ashmolean Museum was built by the University of Oxford, in 1683, to receive Elias Ashmole’s collection of curiosities, the formation of which had originated with the Tradescants. The architect was Sir Christopher Wren. Altogether it was a time of new ideas and new institutions. When the Jewel was found, in 1693, it fell into the hands of persons who belonged both socially and intellectually to the foremost ranks. The first recorded owner was Colonel Nathaniel Palmer, of Fairfield House, in the region of the Quantocks. Of this house and this family some particulars will be related in the ninth chapter. The first notice of the Jewel was published by Dr. Hans Sloane, a Fellow of the Royal Society, eminent as physician, natural philosopher, and antiquarian. He was elected Secretary of that Society in 1693, the year in which the Jewel was found. Whether by reason of the new cloud of political and religious trouble which brooded over the land in the latter years of James II, or from whatever cause, so it was that the _Philosophical Transactions_ had been suspended for the past six years, and they were resuscitated by the new Secretary, who was himself an active contributor. This remarkable man lived to a great age, and when he died, in 1752, in his ninety-second year, his museum was bought by the Government, and this purchase was the origin of the British Museum; for until the middle of the eighteenth century the idea of a national library and museum had never been entertained in England. The same Act of Parliament (26 Geo. II) which directed the purchase of the Sloane museum also directed the purchase of the Harleian collection of manuscripts which had been made by Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, whose name is also memorable in the study of the Alfred Jewel; for it was from an engraving furnished by Robert Harley, and made from a drawing of his own, that the first of the three figures in Hickes’s _Dissertatio Epistolaris_ was printed.