The youth was then twenty-two, and was already a Master of Arts and a Fellow of All Souls; three years later he was chosen Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College in London, and subsequently, in 1661, Savilian professor of the same subject in the University of Oxford. In the same year he was made D.C.L. by both Oxford and Cambridge. During these years he was one of the most active of those “virtuous and learned men of philosophical minds” who, along with Dr. Wilkins, Warden of Wadham, laid the foundations of the Royal Society. A whole page of the “Parentalia”--memoirs written by his son, and the chief source of information concerning his life--is occupied with a catalogue of the New Theories, Inventions, Experiments, and Mechanic Improvements exhibited by Mr. Wren at the meetings in connection with the great movement. One or two examples will serve to show the wide range of his investigations: a weather clock; an artificial eye, with the humours truly and dioptically made; several ways of graving and etching; divers improvements in the art of husbandry; divers new musical instruments; easier ways of whale-fishing; ways to perfect coaches for ease. Indeed there seems to have been nothing in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth, about which he did not know something. These things may be regarded as the by-products of a great imagination, an imagination which made him a skilled astronomer and a profound mathematician. He had an extraordinary aptitude for scientific research, and he was the first who experimented in the infusion of foreign liquid into the blood of animals, a process which, modified to the transfusion of blood from one person to another, has had remarkable results in medicine. He also established, by experiment, before the Royal Society in 1668, the Third Law of Motion; and no doubt his study of the laws of motion subsequently stood him in good stead in his daring feats of architectural construction. The remarkable thing about these studies and experiments is that, amid all their variety, not a word is said about architecture. He was a fair draughtsman, but he was primarily a man of science and a virtuoso, in other words, a man accomplished in the arts and sciences, but who had no need to bring his knowledge to any practical test involving responsibility. He was, however, soon to become more than a virtuoso, for in the year 1661 he was appointed deputy surveyor of his majesty’s works and buildings under Sir John Denham, and, after the latter’s death in 1668, he succeeded him in the office to the exclusion of the more experienced Webb.