me an original member of the Royal Society in 1663. In January 1664
he was forbidden to appear at court, the cause assigned being that he
had interposed too far in favour of the 2nd earl of Bristol, disgraced
by the king on account of the charge of high treason brought by him
against Clarendon into the House of Lords. The rest of his life was
spent in the enjoyment of literary and scientific society at his house
in Covent Garden. He died on the 11th of June 1665. He had five
children, of whom two, a son and one daughter, survived him.

Digby, though he possessed for the time a considerable knowledge of
natural science, and is said to have been the first to explain the
necessity of oxygen to the existence of plants, bears no high place in
the history of science. He was a firm believer in astrology and alchemy,
and the extraordinary fables which he circulated on the subject of his
discoveries are evidence of anything rather than of the scientific
spirit. In 1656 he made public a marvellous account of a city in
Tripoli, petrified in a few hours, which he printed in the _Mercurius
Politicus_. Malicious reports had been current that his wife had been
poisoned by one of his prescriptions, viper wine, taken to preserve her
beauty. Evelyn, who visited him in Paris in 1651, describes him as an
"errant mountebank." Henry Stubbes characterizes him as "the very Pliny
of our age for lying," and Lady Fanshawe refers to the same
"infirmity."[7] His famous "powder of sympathy," which seems to have
been only powder of "vitriol," healed without any contact, by being
merely applied to a rag or bandage taken from the wound, and Digby
records a miraculous cure by this means in a lecture given by him at
Montpellier on this subject in 1658, published in French and English the
same year, in German in 1660 and in Dutch in 1663; but Digby's claim to
its original discovery is doubtful, Nathaniel Highmore in his _History
of Generation_ (1651, p. 113) calling the powder "Talbot's powder," and
ascribing its invention to Sir Gilbert Talbot. Some of Digby's pills and
preparations, however, described in _The Closet of the Eminently Learned
Sir Kenelm Digby Knt. Opened_ (publ. 1677), are said to make less demand
upon the faith of patients, and his injunction on the subject of the
making of tea, to let the water "remain upon it no longer than you can
say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely," is one by no means to be
ridiculed. As a philosopher and an Aristo