as a statesman, soldier, pirate, lover,
and a Roman Catholic possessed of sufficient piety and naked courage to
attempt the conversion of Oliver Cromwell. Like his father, who was
hanged for participation in the Gunpowder Plot, Digby was a political
creature, and during the Civil War he was imprisoned for several years.
When freed, Digby left England to settle in France. Spending much time
at the court of the Queen Dowager, who had been instrumental in securing
his release, and exposed to the vigorous intellectual currents of Paris
and Montpellier, Digby labored upon a treatise of greater scientific
substance and merit than his more famous work on "the powder of
sympathy." Published in 1644 under the title _Two Treatises, in the One
of Which, The Nature of Bodies; in the Other, the Nature of Mans Soule;
is Looked_ _into, in Way of Discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable
Soules_, the book consists of a highly individual survey of the entire
realms of metaphysics, physics, and biology.

Digby's cannons were aimed at scholasticism, which, despite "greatly
exaggerated" reports, did not die with the Middle Ages. The spirit of
scholasticism was alive in many quarters well into the seventeenth
century, and although many scholars worked in pursuit of original
knowledge, they did not always disturb the scholastic philosophic basis
from which their work derived. For example, in his impressive _De
formato foetu_, published in 1604, when Sir Kenelm Digby was one year
old, Fabricius all too often submerges a substantial body of
observations within a dense tangle of philosophical discussion. Thus, in
the same treatise that contains the first illustrations and commendably
accurate descriptions of the daily progress of the chick's development,
Fabricius devotes an inordinate amount of space to tedious discussions
of material and efficient causes in development, emphasizing thereby the
supremacy of the logical framework to the observations. In 1620, Digby's
last year of study at Oxford University, Fienus published a work, _De
Formatrice Foetus_, designed to demonstrate that the human embryo
receives the rational soul on the third day after conception and to
discuss at length such subjects as the efficient cause of embryogeny and
the proposition that the conformation of the fetus is a vital, not a
natural, action. Various expressions of Aristotelian and scholastic
biology were clearly abroad during the first half of the seventeenth
c