The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 1 (of 7)Malkin, Arthur Thomas
History
The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 1 (of 7)
Malkin, Arthur Thomas
Biography
remains suspended at all; about which, since the celebrated experiments
of Pascal, published in 1647, there never has been any controversy. It
was the former phenomenon only which was attributed by some to the
influence of the moon, and which Wren and many of his contemporaries
exercised their ingenuity, as many of their successors have done, in
endeavouring to explain.
In carrying on these investigations and experiments, Wren’s diligence
was stimulated and assisted by his having been admitted a member, about
this period, of that celebrated association of philosophical inquirers,
out of whose meetings, begun some years before, eventually arose the
Royal Society. But, like several others of the more eminent members, he
was soon removed from the comparative retirement of Oxford. On the 7th
of August, 1657, being then only in his twenty-fifth year, he was chosen
to the Professorship of Astronomy in Gresham College. This chair he held
till the 8th of March, 1661, when he resigned it in consequence of
having, on the 31st of January preceding, received the appointment of
Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. On the 12th of September,
1661, he took his degree of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, and was soon
after admitted _ad eundem_ by the sister university. During all this
time he had continued to cultivate assiduously the various branches of
mathematical and physical science, and to extend his reputation both by
his lectures and by his communications to the “Philosophical Club,” as
it was called, which, in 1658, had been transferred to London, and
usually met on the Wednesday of every week at Gresham College, in Wren’s
class-room, and, on the Thursday, in that of his associate Rooke, the
Professor of Geometry. The longitude, the calculation of solar eclipses,
and the examination and delineation of insects and animalcula by means
of the microscope, may be enumerated among the subjects to which he is
known to have devoted his attention. On the 15th of July, 1662[3], he
and his associates were incorporated under the title of the Royal
Society; and Wren, who drew out the preamble of the charter, bore a
chief part in the effecting of this arrangement.
Footnote 3:
In the Life of Boyle this event is stated to have occurred in 1663. A
_second_ charter was granted to the Society, in that year, on the 22d
of April.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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