us, sect; but that they were
themselves the authors of both plague and fire, and that they must look
to themselves to prevent the recurrence of calamities, to all appearance
so peculiarly beyond the reach of human control--so evidently the result
of the wrath of God, or of the craft and subtlety of an enemy.

And one may picture to one's self how harmoniously the holy cursing of
the Puritan of that day would have chimed in with the unholy cursing and
the crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys, and with the revilings
of the political fanatics, if my imaginary plain dealer had gone on
to say that, if the return of such misfortunes were ever rendered
impossible, it would not be in virtue of the victory of the faith
of Laud, or of that of Milton; and, as little, by the triumph of
republicanism, as by that of monarchy. But that the one thing needful
for compassing this end was, that the people of England should second
the effort of an insignificant corporation, the establishment of which,
a few years before the epoch of the great plague and the great fire, had
been as little noticed, as they were conspicuous.

Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague a few calm and
thoughtful students banded themselves together for the purpose, as they
phrased it, of "improving natural knowledge." The ends they proposed
to attain cannot be stated more clearly than in the words of one of the
founders of the organization:--

"Our business 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,
Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments;
with the state of these studies and their cultivation at home and
abroad. We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves
in the veins, the venae lacteae, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican
hypothesis, the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of
Jupiter, the oval shape (as it then appeared) of Saturn, the spots
on the sun and its turning on its own axis, the inequalities and
selenography of the moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury, the
improvement of telescopes and grinding of glasses for that purpose,
the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities and
nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver,
the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of accelerat