weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities and
nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver,
the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration therein, with
divers other things of like nature, some of which were then but new
discoveries, and others not so generally known and embraced as now they
are; with other things appertaining to what hath been called the New
Philosophy, which, from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir
Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated in
Italy, France, Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in
England."

The learned Dr. Wallis, writing in 1696, narrates, in these words, what
happened half a century before, or about 1645. The associates met at
Oxford, in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, who was destined to become a
bishop; and subsequently coming together in London, they attracted the
notice of the king. And it is a strange evidence of the taste for
knowledge which the most obviously worthless of the Stuarts shared with
his father and grandfather, that Charles the Second was not content
with saying witty things about his philosophers, but did wise things
with regard to them. For he not only bestowed upon them such attention
as he could spare from his poodles and his mistresses, but, being in his
usual state of impecuniosity, begged for them of the Duke of Ormond;
and, that step being without effect, gave them Chelsea College, a
charter, and a mace: crowning his favours in the best way they could be
crowned, by burdening them no further with royal patronage or state
interference.

Thus it was that the half-dozen young men, studious of the "New
Philosophy," who met in one another's lodgings in Oxford or in London,
in the middle of the seventeenth century, grew in numerical and in real