close of Elizabeth's reign; the next,
the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, which was taught by
Harvey in the reign of James. Apart from these illustrious names England
took little share in the scientific movement of the Continent; and her
whole energies seemed to be whirled into the vortex of theology and
politics by the Civil War.

But the war had not reached its end when, in 1645, a little group of
students were to be seen in London, men "inquisitive," says one of them,
"into natural philosophy and other parts of human learning, and
particularly of what had 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 strife of the
time indeed aided in directing the minds of men to natural inquiries.
"To have been always tossing about some theological question," says the
first historian of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, "would have been to
have made that their private diversion, the excess of which they
disliked in the public. To have been eternally musing on civil business
and the distresses of the country was too melancholy a reflection. It
was nature alone which could pleasantly entertain them in that estate."
Foremost in the group stood Doctors Wallis and Wilkins, whose removal to
Oxford, which had just been reorganized by the Puritan Visitors, divided
the little company in 1648 into two societies, one at the university,
the other remaining at the capital. The Oxford society, which was the
more important of the two, held its meetings at the lodgings of Dr.
Wilkins, who had become Warden of Wadham College; and added to the names
of its members that of the eminent mathematician Dr. Ward, and that of
the first of English economists, Sir William Petty. "Our business,"
Wallis tells us, "was (precluding matters of theology and State affairs)
to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries and such as
related thereunto, as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation,
Statics, Magnetics, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments: with
the state of these studies, as then cultivated at home and abroad. We
then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the _venae
lacteae_, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of
comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape