By the middle of this century the learned of all European countries had been attracted by the knowledge gained of the material universe. In England the secrets of science were attacked with enthusiasm under the new strategy of Lord Bacon, enunciated in his _Novum Organum_. The new philosophy was patronised by royalty itself, and studied by a company of brilliant men of whom the leading physicist was Robert Boyle, soon famous for his law connecting the volumes and the pressures of gases. In France, too, a great enthusiasm for science took birth. A group of men, of whom the most eminent was Christian Huyghens, banded themselves together to further scientific inquiry into the phenomena of nature and to demolish the reigning myths and fallacies: they also working admittedly by the experimental method of Bacon. The time was ripe, however, for wider recognition of these scientists and the grand object of their labours. Within a short time the two groups were both given the charter of their respective countries; in France they were enrolled as the Royal Academy of Sciences; in England, as the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge. In other countries societies of a similar kind were formed, but their influence was not comparable with that exerted by the societies of London and Paris. Between these two a correspondence was started which afterwards developed into one of the most famous of publications: the _Philosophical Transactions_. In England, especially, the Royal Society served from its inception as a focus for all the great minds of the day, and in time brought together such men as Newton, Wren, Hooke, Wallis, Boyle--not to mention his majesty King Charles himself; who, with the best intentions, could not always take seriously the speculations of the savants. “Gresham College he mightily laughed at,” noted Mr. Pepys in his diary for the first of February, 1663, “for spending time only in weighing of ayre, and doing nothing else since they sat.” A year later Pepys was himself admitted a member of the distinguished company, and found it “a most acceptable thing to hear their discourse, and see their experiments, which were this day on fire, and how it goes out in a place where the air is not free, and sooner out in a place where the ayre is exhausted, which they showed by an engine on purpose.” § In the year 1663, just after the formation of the Royal Society, a small book was published by the Marquis of Worcester, _A Century of the Names and Scantlings of such Inventions as he had tried and perfected_. Of these inventions one, the sixty-eighth, is thus described: