deserting Bristol, Bath, and other resorts in their favour. But their popularity was to receive a check, for the Public Advertiser of 1753 announced that these waters had been submitted to a celebrated chemist, who was unable to detect in them any constituent, beyond some excess of iron, to which any therapeutic value could be attributed.

A passage in the 'Memoirs of Bishop Hildesley' discloses who was the celebrated chemist :

'Hales analysed mineral waters; and, from the pure love of truth and humanity, detected the impositions of those who would have recommended common water to the afflicted as a specific for all disorders. This he particularly exemplified in the Glastonbury waters; and in those of a spring not far from Godstone, in Surrey, which were very much extolled in the newspapers of the time, but clearly shown by Dr. Hales to possess no other properties than those of common spring water.'

In 1753 the veteran physician, and world-renowned collector, Sir Hans Sloane, died, and Hales was elected a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences in his place.

Despite advancing years, nothing more strikingly proves Hales' solicitude for the furtherance of scientific methods in commerce than his activity in helping to found that unique institution, the still flourishing Royal Society of Arts. From Sir Henry Wood we learn:

'On 22nd March 1754 there was held at Rawthmell's coffee house, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, "A meeting of some noblemen, clergy, gentlemen, and merchants, in order to form a society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures, and commerce in Great Britain." Eleven in all attended-Viscount Folkestone; Lord Romney; Dr. Stephen Hales, F.R.S.; Henry Baker, F.R.S. (naturalist and author, who married Defoe's youngest daughter); Gustavas Brander, F.R.S. (merchant, antiquary, and a director of the Bank of England); James Short, F.R.S. (optician and astronomer); John Goodchild; Nicholas Crisp (watchmaker, of Bow Churchyard); Charles Lawrence; Husband Messiter (a surgeon); and William Shipley.'

'On 5th February 1755, Viscount Folkestone was elected the first president, with Lord Romney, Charles Whitworth, James Theobald, and Stephen Hales, vice-presidents. John Goodchild was made treasurer, and William Shipley, secretary.'

The Society's income, during Hales' life, reflects the public favour it enjoyed-rising from £360 in 1755 to £3656 in 1761.

Hales was instrumental in securing for Teddington parish

a good water supply, and it is characteristic of the mechanical bent of his mind, and of his burning desire for precision, that he recorded in the parish register that the outflow would fill a twoquart vessel in 'three swings of the pendulum beating seconds, 'which pendulum was 39+ inches long from the suspending 'nail to the middle of the plumbet or bob.'

Among his other activities was the enlargement, in 1734, of the churchyard, ‘by prevailing with the lord of the manor.' In 1748 he helped the parishioners to put up a lantern on the church tower, that the bells might better be heard. In 1754 the timber tower on which the lantern stood was demolished, and a brick one substituted. In 1753 he arranged for the erection of a new aisle, himself subscribing £200, and personally superintending the building operations.

His last signature in the Teddington registers occurs on 4th November 1760. He died on the 4th January following, and was buried, as was his desire, under the tower of the parish church which he had helped to rebuild. The Princess of Wales erected a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. It contains a bas-relief likeness in profile by Wilton.

Hales was painted by Francis Cotes, R.A., and the portrait was engraved by Hopwood. It appears in R. J. Thornton's 'Botanical Plates,' 1810, and a remarkably good-looking man he must have been. He also sat to Hudson.

By the instrumentality of the Duchess of Portland, the Rev. Edward Young, the author of 'Night Thoughts,' was offered the post of clerk to the closet to the Princess of Wales, vacant by the death of Hales, and in accepting it he pays the following tribute to his predecessor :

'20th January 1761, Wellwyn. I have taken some hours to consider of the very kind offer your Grace is so good to make me. I am old, and, I bless God, far from want; but as the honour is great and the duty small, and especially as your Grace seems desirous I should accept it, I do accept it with great gratitude for your remembrance of one who might easily and naturally be forgotten. The honour indeed is great, and in my sight greater still, as I succeed to so great and good a man. Would to God I could tread in all his other steps as well as this.'

The Rev. Mark Hildesley, appointed to the see of Sodor and Man in 1755, had for twenty years, as vicar of Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, been a friend and neighbour of Edward Young

at Wellwyn. Samuel Richardson, writing to the bishop on 24th September 1761, says:

... I have the great pleasure of congratulating you on Dr. Young's promotion, as he is the immediate successor and heir of one of the best divines, and soundest Christians, and usefulest genius that ever graced a court, or a nation-Dr. Stephen Hales. This, I know, is a circumstance that your Lordship will hear with pleasure. . . .

To this the bishop, in somewhat doubtful English, answered :—

I

'Your paragraph relating to Dr. Young, did, as you rightly judged, give much pleasure; not so much as altogether on his account, as of the family he is likely to prove a blessing to, by supplying the great loss her Royal Highness and her offspring have suffered in the death of her late pious and worthy curator, in her domestic spiritual concerns. wrote to good Dr. Hales, the 15th of October last, and, notwithstanding the usually uncertain passage of letters to and from hence, through the various hands they are committed to, by sea and land, I received an answer from him of two folio pages, close wrote, dated the 25th of the same month; at the conclusion of which, he says, "This is a long letter for one in his 84th year." As my father had the honour of dispensing the first rudiments of his education, the doctor thought proper to transfer some part of that regard he had for his tutor to the less worthy son.'

A passage in the obituary notice, in the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1761, affords an insight into Hales' individuality :

'His knowledge appeared to everybody near him to feed his mind with a nourishment which gave him, in the decline of life, and even in its last stages, that vigour and serenity of understanding, and clearness of ideas, which so few possess, even in the flower of manhood, and which, he used often to say, he valued as the most perfect of all human pleasures. . . . There were two things in his character which particularly distinguished him from almost every other man. The first was, that his mind was so habitually bent on acquiring knowledge, that, having what we thought an abundant income, he was solicitous to avoid any further preferment in the church, lest his time and attention might thereby be diverted from his other favourite and useful occupations. The other feature of his character was no less singular. He could look even upon wicked men, and those who did him unkind offices, without any emotion of particular indignation; not from want of discernment or sensibility, but he used to consider them only like those experiments which, upon trial, he found could never be applied to any useful purpose, and which he therefore calmly and dispassionately laid aside.'

No less pleasing are Gilbert White's remarks to Robert Marsham, written on 25th February 1791-that is, thirty years after Hales' decease :

'Though a man of a baronet's family, and of one of the best houses in Kent, yet was his humility so prevalent, that he did not disdain the lowest offices, provided they tended to the good of his fellow creatures. The last act of benevolence in which I saw him employed was at his rectory of Farringdon, the next parish to this (Selborne), where I found him in the street with his paint pot before him, and much busied in painting white, with his own hands, the tops of the footpaths' posts, that his neighbours might not be injured by running against them in the dark. His whole mind seemed replete with experiment. . . . He used to lament how tedious a task it was to convince men that sweet air was better than foul. He once told my father, with some degree of emotion, that the first time he went on board a ship in harbour at Portsmouth the officers were rude to him; and that he verily believed he should never have prevailed to have seen his ventilators in use in the Royal Navy, had not Lord Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, abetted his pursuits in a liberal manner, and sent him down to the Commissioners of the Dock with letters of recommendation.'

How comes it that a life of such noble endeavour and remarkable achievement looms so little in history? The answer, it is opined, lies in part in the mental attitude of the eighteenth century a century that appreciated the artistic cult, but regarded matter as something essentially vile, and its investigation rather the business of the low mechanic-an attitude all too faithfully reflected in the dictum of one of the most gifted ladies of that, or any other century. For writing to the Abbé Conti in 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu delivers herself thus:

'Considering what short-lived, weak animals men are, is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasure? You know how to divide the idea of pleasure from that of vice, and they are only mingled in the heads of fools. I had rather be a rich effendi with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.'

But if our sketch of this eighteenth-century philosopher have any pretence to accuracy, we are surely constrained to allow that he fulfilled, well-nigh to perfection, the ideal of his contemporary, Bishop Berkeley: Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a 'few. Certainly, where it is the chief passion, it doth not give 'way to vulgar cares and views; nor is it contented with a little ardour in the early time of life, active perhaps to pursue, but He that would make a real

'not so fit to weigh and revise. progress in knowledge must dedicate his age as well as youth, the latter growth as well as first fruits, at the altar of truth.'

J. PAUL DE CASTRO.

THE CALCUTTA UNIVERSITY

COMMISSION

Calcutta University Commission, 1917-1919, Report. Part I., Analysis of the Present Conditions, vols. i.-iii., c. i.-xxix.

Part II., Recommenda

tions of the Commission, vols. iv.-v., c. xxx.-lii. Calcutta. 1919.

OF

F the literary quality of a blue-book (though, to be strictly accurate, it must be confessed that the book in question is not a blue-book, but a series of five books in a delicate field-grey) it beseems not critics to speak. Yet, without speaking, one may sigh; and these volumes provoke a gentle sigh. The Report of Mr. Montagu on the future government of India is a fairly slim volume, which one may easily slip into a pocket (experto crede). The Report of Sir Michael Sadler and his six colleagues on the future constitution of a university in one of the provinces of India (if one add eight volumes of appendices to five volumes of the Report proper) will fill a bookshelf. One of the commissioners is a distinguished educational scholar, who naturally runs into disquisitions-wise and illuminating disquisitions on such things as the relation of universities to the State, or the relation of private to public effort in the field of secondary education. Another is a distinguished historical scholar who, believing that the roots of the present lie deep in the past, proceeds to prepare the ground for reform by a process of double digging which is at once instructive and exhaustive. No conclusion is stated without a large array of data; and sometimes the conclusion that emerges, after much marshalling of evidence, is one which the reader would gladly have accepted many pages before it is reached. Perhaps we who read educational reports are sceptics, and stand in need of much convincing ; perhaps the commissioners were overwhelmed by the mass of evidence, and, having the pens of ready writers, they prepared 'Digesta' or 'Pandecta' on a more liberal scale than Tribonian, who could boast that he had reduced 3,000,000 lines to some 150,000. At any rate the Report has two qualities. It is luminous. It is also voluminous.

VOL. 231. NO. 471.