Spanish Alliance, which will usher in the new
century. But amid all this political turmoil the march of scientific
discovery has gone serenely on; or, if not serenely, then steadily, and
perhaps as serenely as could be hoped. Boyle has discovered the law of
the elasticity of gases and a host of minor things. Robert Hooke is
on the track of many marvels. But all else pales before the fact that
Newton has just given to the world his marvellous law of gravitation,
which has been published, with authority of the Royal Society, through
the financial aid of Halley. The brilliant but erratic Hooke lias
contested the priority of discovery and strenuously claimed a share in
it. Halley eventually urges Newton to consider Hooke's claim in some of
the details, and Newton yields to the extent of admitting that the
great fact of gravitational force varying inversely as the square of
the distance had been independently discovered by Hooke; but he includes
also Halley himself and Sir Christopher Wren, along with Hooke,
as equally independent discoverers of the same principle. To the
twentieth-century consciousness it seems odd to hear Wren thus named as
a scientific discoverer; but in truth the builder of St. Paul's began
life as a professor of astronomy at Gresham College, and was the
immediate predecessor of Newton himself in the presidential chair of the
Royal Society. Now, at the very close of the seventeenth century, Boyle
is recently dead, but Hooke, Wren, Halley, and Newton still survive:
some of them are scarcely past their prime. It is a wonderful galaxy of
stars of the first magnitude, and even should no other such names come
in after-time, England's place among the scientific constellations is
secure.

But now as we turn to the souvenirs of Cooke and Wollaston and Davy
the scene shifts by a hundred years. We are standing now in the closing
epoch of the eighteenth century. These again are troublous times. The
great new colony in the West has just broken off from the parent swarm.
Now all Europe is in turmoil. The French war-cloud casts its ominous
shadow everywhere. Even in England mutterings of the French Revolution
are not without an echo. The spirit of war is in the air. And yet, as
before, the spirit of science also is in the air. The strain of the
political relations does not prevent a perpetual exchange of courtesy
between scientific men and scientific bodies of various nations. Davy's
dictum that "science knows no coun