Robert Boyle was born at Youghall, in the province of Munster, on the 25th of January, 1627. He was the seventh son, and the fourteenth child of Richard, Earl of Cork. He was partly educated at home, and partly at Eton, where he was under the tuition of Sir Henry Wotton. At the age of eleven, he travelled with his brother and a French tutor through France to Geneva, where he pursued his studies for twenty-one months, and then went to Italy. During this period, he acquired the French and Italian languages; and, indeed, talked in the former with so much fluency and correctness, that he passed, when he thought proper, for a Frenchman. In 1642, his father’s finances were deranged, by the breaking out of the great Irish rebellion. His tutor, who was a Genevese, was obliged to borrow, on his own credit, a sum of money sufficient to carry him home. On his arrival, he found his father dead; and, though two estates had been left to him, such was the state of the times, that several years elapsed before he could command the requisite sum of money to supply his exigencies. He retired to an estate at Stalbridge, in Dorsetshire. In 1654 he went to Oxford, where he associated himself with a number of eminent men (Dr. Willis among others), who had constituted themselves into a combination for experimental investigations, distinguished by the name of the _Philosophical College_. This society was transferred to London; and, in 1663, was incorporated by Charles II. under the name of the _Royal Society_. In 1668 Mr. Boyle took up his residence in London, where he continued till the last day of December, 1691, assiduously occupied in experimental investigations, on which day he died, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. We are indebted to Mr. Boyle for the first introduction of the air-pump and the thermometer into Britain, and for contributing so much, by means of Dr. Hooke, to the improvement of both. His hydrostatical and pneumatical investigations and experiments constitute the foundation of these two sciences. The thermometer was first made an accurate instrument of investigation by Sir Isaac Newton, in 1701. This he did by selecting as two fixed points the temperatures at which water freezes and boils; marking these upon the stem of the thermometer, and dividing the interval between them into a certain number of degrees. All thermometers made in this way will stand at the same point when plunged into bodies of the same temperature. The number of divisions between the freezing and boiling points constitute the cause of the differences between different thermometers. In Fahrenheit’s thermometer, which is used in Great Britain, the number of degrees, between the freezing and boiling points of water, is 180; in Reaumur’s it is 80; in Celsius’s, or the centigrade, it is 100; and in De Lisle’s it is 150.