AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

CLERIC-SCIENTIST

1. The Magdalen Hospital: The Story of a Great Charity. By the Rev. H. F. B. COMPSTON. 1917.

2. Eighteenth-Century Fires in Cornhill: Notes and Queries, 9th December 1916.

3. The History of the Royal Society of Arts. By SIR HENRY TRUEMAN WOOD. 1913.

4. Dictionary of National Biography. Article: 'Stephen Hales.'

MR.

R. COMPSTON, in his story of the Magdalen Hospital, remarks that 'the eighteenth century was a period of social 'reform and charitable enterprise. . . The work of the 'devout and large-hearted layman. . is a conspicuous feature of 'the period. The clergy displayed little or no initiative in such 'work. They were too often in a state of sleepiness and 'subservience.'

It may somewhat mollify this perfectly just stricture to consider some of the achievements of a parish priest who made researches of capital importance in pneumatic chemistry, and in animal and vegetable physiology; who effected improved ventilation for prisons, hospitals, and ships of war; who, for humanitarian ends, laid vivisection under contribution; who rendered active assistance in establishing the colony of Georgia; who was foremost in founding the Society of Arts; who waged war against gin drinking; who was a pioneer in the study of vital statistics; and who demonstrated the mechanism of earthquakes in the hope that Nature's modus operandi might be better understood by the bewildered Londoner of 1750.

At Teddington, by the Thames, stands an old and diminutive three-gabled brick church-now disused-with red tiled roof and squat ivy-clad tower, within whose precincts are buried two remarkable inhabitants, who died within a year of each other. In 1760, when but thirty-nine, was laid to rest Miss Margaret Woffington, whose histrionic graces are part of eighteenthcentury stage-history, whose lineaments of mortal beauty attracted Hogarth's brush at least thrice, whose 'gay airs' were

celebrated by Fielding; whose personal charms captivated men no less gifted than Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and—perhaps most noteworthy-drew from a rival, Mrs Bellamy, the admission that she was 'the enchantress 'of all hearts.' In January 1761 was interred the church's incumbent of upwards of half-a-century, the Rev. Stephen Hales, who, like Abraham, 'died in a good old age,' nigh eighty-four years. It is the purpose of the following sketch to show that this original, self-poised, and versatile minister, who, we may hope, brought all the comfort he could to the bed-ridden actress resident three years at Udney Hall within his cure, deserves also a place in the annals of his country.

Though so long linked to Teddington, Hale's experiences were by no means confined to it. In 1696, when eighteen, he had been sent by his father-Sir Thomas Hales, of Bekesbourne, near Canterbury, whose sixth son he was, to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1699.

There entered at Corpus, shortly after Hales became a Fellow, in 1703, no less a person than William Stukely, the noted antiquary, eventually an M.D., and Fellow of the College of Physicians. The young men coalesced, and, actuated by kindred tastes, they together rambled over the Gogmagog Hills, and the bogs of Cherry-Hinton Moor. They gathered botanical specimens, collected fossils in the chalkpits, and minerals from the gravels, afterwards extending their investigations from the superficial structure of natural objects to the more hidden truths of anatomy, by dissecting frogs and other animals. From frogs they passed to dogs, and Hales' method of obtaining a facsimile of a dog's lungs in lead displays the genuine traits of the inborn experimenter. They then applied themselves to chemistry. They repeated many of Boyle's experiments-still classics-and attended the lectures given in Queens' College Cloisters by Vigani, the first professor of Chemistry at Cambridge. They also witnessed chemical operations, conducted by Vigani, in a room in Trinity College, 'which had been the laboratory of Sir Isaac Newton, and in which, unfortunately for the world, Sir 'Isaac's manuscript concerning chemical principles was acci'dentally burnt.' From chemistry Hales passed to astronomy, the principles of which he so well mastered as to enable him to design an apparatus representing the motions of the planets.

In 1710 Hales was presented to the perpetual cure of Teddington, and he became a Bachelor of Divinity in 1711. Those were the days of pluralists, and in 1717 he also received the benefice of Porlock, in Somersetshire, and by accepting it vacated his College Fellowship.* The Porlock living he held until 1723, but the church registers afford no evidence that he ever visited this West of England village, so famed for its scenery, 'lying ensconced in a deep amphitheatre of foliage,' and opening to the sea.

In 1719 Hales detailed a series of experiments to the Royal Society (of which he had become a Fellow the year before), on the effect of the sun's warmth in raising the sap in trees. The Society urged him to prosecute his inquiries.

Meanwhile, in 1723, he had exchanged the living of Porlock for that of Farringdon, in Hampshire, situated three miles south of Alton. That he regularly visited this village is clear, for the celebrated Gilbert White, the last curate-in-charge appointed by Hales, wrote to Robert Marsham, Esq., of Stratton Strawless, in Norfolk, in 1790:

For

'The late Dr. Stephen Hales was my most valuable friend, and in former days near neighbour during the summer months. though his usual abode was at Teddington, yet he did for many years reside for about two months at his rectory at Farringdon, and was well known to my grandfather and father, as well as myself.'

Encouraged by the Royal Society, and no less by the vista his investigations had opened out, Hales pursued his experiments, and in 1727 published his 'Vegetable Statics.' The work is dedicated to the Prince of Wales, who, a few months later, became George II. He was immediately elected to the Council of the Society on the occasion, as it happened, that Sir Hans Sloane first occupied the presidential chair vacated by the death of Newton.

A second edition of the 'Vegetable Statics' appeared in 1731, and in the preface a sequel was promised. This Hales published in 1733, under the title, 'Hæmastatics: or an account ' of some hydraulic hydrostatical experiments made on the blood and blood vessels of animals.'

Legally, the holding of one living, and one perpetual curacy, did not constitute pluralism; consequently Hales never had to obtain a dispensation from the Archbishop, as I am informed by the Rev. C. Jenkins, librarian at Lambeth Palace.

Instead of attempting an independent epitome of the 'Vegetable Statics' and of the 'Hæmastatics,' we reproduce the opinions of two men of science far better qualified to estimate them. Of Hales' botanical work, Julius von Sachs tells us :—

All the work done from Malpighi and Mariotte to Ingenhousz, to advance the knowledge of the nutrition of plants, was thrown into the shade by the brilliant investigations of Stephen Hales, in whom we see the genius of discovery, and the sound original reasoning powers of the great explorers of nature in Newton's age. His Statical Essays was devoted to a more complete account of the nutrition of plants and of the movements of sap in them. It was chiefly composed of the author's own investigations. An abundance of new experiments and observations, measurements and calculations, combine to form a living picture of the whole subject. . . . Hales may be said to have made his plants themselves speak; by means of cleverly contrived and skilfully managed experiments, he compelled them to disclose the forces that were at work in them by effects made apparent to the eye, and thus to show that forces of a very peculiar kind are in constant activity in the quiet and apparently passive organs of vegetation. . . . His investigations into transpiration and the movement of water in the wood were greeted with the warmest approbation. He measured the quantity of water sucked in by the roots and given off by the leaves, compared this with the supply of moisture contained in the earth, and endeavoured to calculate the rapidity with which the water rises in the stem, and to compare it with the rapidity of its entrance into the roots and its exit by the leaves. The experiments, by which he showed the force of suction in wood and roots and that of the root-pressure in the case of the bleeding vine, were particularly striking and instructive. . . . He was the first who proved that air co-operates in the building up the body of the plant, in the formation of its solid substance, and that gaseous constituents contribute largely to the nourishment of the plant; consequently that neither water, nor the substances which it carries with it from the earth, alone supply the material of which plants are composed, as had been generally imagined. If we compare what was known before Malpighi's time with the contents of Hales' book, we shall be astonished at the rapid advance made in less than sixty years, while scarcely anything had been contributed to the subject in the period between Aristotle and Malpighi.'

Turning to Hales' researches in physiology with which the 'Hæmastatics' is occupied, the late Sir Michael Foster, Professor of Physiology at Cambridge, wrote as follows:—

'Hales not only exactly measured the amount of blood pressure under varying circumstances, the capacity of the heart, the diameter of the blood vessels and the like, and from his several data made his calculations and drew his conclusions, but also, by an ingenious

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method, he measured the rate of the flow of blood in the capillaries in the abdominal muscles and lungs of a frog. He knew how to keep blood fluid with saline solutions, studied the form of muscles at rest and in contraction, and speculated that what we now call a nervous impulse, but which was then spoken of as the animal spirits, might possibly be an electric change. And though he accepted the current view that the heat of the body was produced by the friction of the blood in the capillaries, he was not wholly content with this, but speaks of the mutually vibrating action of fluids and solids in a way that makes us feel that, had the chemistry of the time been as advanced as were the physics, many weary years of error and ignorance might have been saved.'

In 1732 Hales was appointed one of the trustees for establishing a new colony in Georgia, and among his coadjutors were James (afterwards Admiral) Vernon, Thomas Coram, a 'devout ' and large-hearted' mariner, who was possibly already revolving in his mind a hospital for foundlings, and James (afterwards General) Oglethorpe, whom Mr. Austin Dobson regards as ‘a 'Paladin of Philanthropy.' The trustees had power to appoint Commissioners, among whom figure Viscount Tyrconnel, of Arlington Street; Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., of Bloomsbury Square; and Sir John Gonson, of the Temple, whose face is so well known as that of the 'raiding justice,' in the third plate of Hogarth's 'Harlot's Progress.'

After the publication of his 'Hæmastatics,' Hales, repelled by the disagreeablenesses of anatomical pursuits, temporarily suspended his researches, and turned his attention to a pressing social evil. Says the historian, J. R. Green, of this period: 'The 'introduction of gin gave a new impetus to drunkenness. In 'the streets of London, at one time, gin shops invited every passer'by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence.' Hales, seriously exercised by the subversion of the health and moral well-being of the lower and middle classes by these excesses, put forth, in 1734, 'A Friendly Admonition to the 'Drinkers of Brandy and other Distilled Spirits.' The tractate met with much favour, and a sixth edition appeared as late as 1807. In 1736 he contributed the yet more important Dis

Hales' piezometer' is still an instrument of precision (see Dorland's American Illustrated Medical Dictionary.' Philadelphia. 1917).

A perusal of it makes it clear that Hales did not advocate total abstinence; he appears, in fact, to have had no objection to the consumption of pure wines containing moderate quantities of alcohol.