e, and the earliest botanical
researches of Sloane. It was then that Ray made a new classification
of birds and fishes, and that the attention of Woodward was first drawn
towards fossils and shells. One after another phantoms which had haunted
the world through ages of darkness fled before the light. Astrology and
alchymy became jests. Soon there was scarcely a county in which some of
the Quorum did not smile contemptuously when an old woman was brought
before them for riding on broomsticks or giving cattle the murrain. But
it was in those noblest and most arduous departments of knowledge
in which induction and mathematical demonstration cooperate for the
discovery of truth, that the English genius won in that age the most
memorable triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of statics on
a new foundation. Edmund Halley investigated the properties of the
atmosphere, the ebb and flow of the sea, the laws of magnetism, and the
course of the comets; nor did he shrink from toil, peril and exile in
the cause of science. While he, on the rock of Saint Helena, mapped the
constellations of the southern hemisphere, our national observatory was
rising at Greenwich: and John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal,
was commencing that long series of observations which is never mentioned
without respect and gratitude in any part of the globe. But the glory
of these men, eminent as they were, is cast into the shade by the
transcendent lustre of one immortal name. In Isaac Newton two kinds of
intellectual power, which have little in common, and which are not often
found together in a very high degree of vigour, but which nevertheless
are equally necessary in the most sublime departments of physics, were
united as they have never been united before or since. There may have
been minds as happily constituted as his for the cultivation of pure
mathematical science: there may have been minds as happily constituted
for the cultivation of science purely experimental; but in no other mind
have the demonstrative faculty and the inductive faculty coexisted in
such supreme excellence and perfect harmony. Perhaps in the days of
Scotists and Thomists even his intellect might have run to waste, as
many intellects ran to waste which were inferior only to his. Happily
the spirit of the age on which his lot was cast, gave the right
direction to his mind; and his mind reacted with tenfold force on the
spirit of the age. In the year 1685 his fame, thoug