the pathological phenomena; but that true chemistry may assist him to explicate divers of them, which can scarce be solidly explicated without it. And let me add, that he, that thoroughly understands the nature of ferments and fermentation shall probably be much better able than he that ignores them, to give a fair account of divers phenomena of several diseases (as well fevers as others) which will perhaps be never thoroughly understood, without an insight into the doctrine of fermentation; in order to which, for that and other reasons, I designed my historical notes touching that subject." 1 So that the work of Pasteur, which is healing the wound of French agriculture, strikes its roots into the sagacious mind of the Englishman of the seventeenth century.

In the Sceptical Chemist, perhaps the most influential of all his works, Boyle reviews with irresistible clearness and conclusiveness the arguments of the school-men and points out the better way of induction as the only source of trustworthy knowledge of nature. The paper is skilfully cast into the form of doubts about the prevalent reasoning concerning natural phenomena, and leads the reader to see that it consisted largely of assumption, and that to learn of Nature one must become her pupil. I believe this book of Boyle's to be the first effective blow ever delivered at a priori, and the first really effective appeal to men to form their judgments of natural phenomena after rather than before a study of those phenomena.

He opposed Aristotle's system, not from any lack of recognition of his transcendent merit, but because he saw that the study of causes and the Final Cause had sublimed out of all contact with the facts of Nature, and that to bring men back to Nature, a new departure must be made. And with singular consistency and loyalty to his own convictions, for many years he refused to read Descartes-greatly to the astonishment of Locke-in order that he might leave his mind open and fresh to any truth that his own experiments might reveal to him. It is of course impossible that his long intimacy with Locke could have left him ignorant of Descartes, or wholly unimpressed by his system.

Boyle, in the Sceptical Chemist, was the first man to utter serious doubts as to the theory of the peripatetics and of the alchemists; he disputed the elementary character of fire, air, earth and water; said we must not be limited to three or four elements-that we shall some day find a larger number. He denounced the obscurity with which alchemists parade their alleged discoveries, and rebukes the alchemists for calling combinations of metals with acids, especially aqua fortis, the elements of those metals themselves. He says: "It is possible,

that one body is composed of two elements, another of three, &c., and that one body may not have any of the same elements that another has; as we often see two words, whereof the one has not any of the letters to be met with in the other."

The lost paper.

He proposed trials to Dr. Lower based on experiments of his own concerning the transfusion of blood and the effect of new blood on the recipient animal. Many other speculations in Physiology originated with him. Boyle overthrew the alchemists at a touch, when he suggested in The Sceptical Chemist that in addition to visible and palpable elements there may be others more subtle and invisible that escape through the joints of the vessels.

Though Otto Guericke invented the air-pump, Boyle had no knowledge of it, and Birch says "that he, Boyle, invented that admirable engine." He ascertained and correctly stated all the essential properties of air; this he accomplished by means of an air-pump, constructed by Mr. Robert Hooke after original design by Boyle, including the glass-receiver on a metallic base,' and by this means established the science of pneumatics. His first publication on the subject was in 1660, at Oxford, under the title New Experiments, physico-mechanical touching the spring of the air and its effects, made for the most part in a new pneumatical engine. The work recorded in this paper included an experimental demonstration of the nature of a vacuum. He found or proved the pressure of air to be the cause of the Torricellian vacuum, showed the impossibility of a perfect vacuum, explained suction, loss of weight of bodies in vacuo, the necessity of air to combustion, and in short nearly every fact and principle in the behavior of the air.

Torricelli had made his tube and substantially fixed the fact of the materiality of the air. His theory of fluids drew Pascal from geometry to physics, and the result of the labors of this acute scholar was the dissertations on the Equilibrium of Fluids and the Weight of the Atmosphere, in which are given the first barometric measurements. (This work of Pascal brought on the controversy with Father Noël, an Aristotelian, which was the last real struggle of the old philosophy.) In these books Pascal extended the conception of fluid equilibrium to air as well as water, and also pointed out the compressibility of one and the incompressibility of the other. He reached the point of showing that air is compressible and there stopped. Boyle made, independently and almost simultaneously, the same discoveries, but did not stop; he asked the question, that has ever opened the door to real knowledge and marks the dividing line between knowledge and information, how much is air compressed for any given pressure? He also asked, how much does it expand or contract for any given change in temperature? And are the properties of air predicable of other gaseous bodies? In the year 1650, he found the law since known by his name (twenty-six years before Mariotte who has had the undeserved fortune to get his name associated with the discovery); and in the dim light of that early morning of science, a hundred years before Watt's steam engine, he worked out and established the law upon which unchanged foundation

'Guericke depended on water for his vacuum, and did not know the use of the glass receiver.

the whole modern science of steam-engineering securely rests.' This law has been empirically yerified by the French Academy and found to be true to twenty-seven atmospheres.

He found that air once exposed to an excess of burning fuel will not again sustain combustion or life; that air which has been breathed sustains fire feebly; that distillation in a closed retort produces compounds totally unlike those of open combustion, the lack of which distinction vitiates nearly all the work of Van Helmont; that "an air" obtained by heating certain metallic salts intensifies combustion; found that fermentation and putrefaction are impossible in vacuo; spoke of a vital substance in air; in short he left nothing for Lavoisier but to pronounce the word Oxygen.

He discriminated carefully between air and ether, in that air refracts the rays of light, and comes very close to a statement of the possibility of Crooke's Radiant Matter.

Probably Boyle's tract Fire and Flame, gave George Ernst Stahl his idea of Phlogiston, though the acute German's claim to the origination of the idea is not affected by this fact.

Boyle clearly intimates his own belief in one ultimate, simple form of matter, precisely what Lockyer's spectroscope is now leading us to. He published the first tables of specific gravities, which are as accurate as his apparatus could give.

Boyle showed that the prevalent view of acid and alkaline parts in all bodies is undemonstrable and precarious, and that there is no criterion to which all acids can be brought. He noted the tastelessness of some undoubted acids, showed the convertibility of ternary compounds of nitrogen from an acid to an alkaline condition and vice versa, and having thus overturned much of the iatro-chemistry of the day, he paved the way to a rational theory of chemical attraction.

Whether Boyle or Pascal had the larger share in developing the laws of Hydrostatics may perhaps be questioned; Buckle says we owe to Boyle the first exact experiments in the relation between color and heat; that he laid the foundation for the union of optics and thermics; and that he established hydrostatics as a science. It is doubtless true here as in pneumatics, that Pascal stopped with the demonstrated fact, but Boyle pushed on to the controlling principle.

He trod close to the truth under many strange disguises; for instance he says, air is composed of three kinds of molecules: 1st, From exhalations from waters (vapor), minerals, vegetables (oxygen), and animals (carbonic oxide), that exists on the earth's surface; 2d, much more subtile, consists of magnetic effluvia from the earth, and produces by attack upon innumerable atoms emanating from the stars, the sensation of light (terrestrial magnetism and aurora borealis); 3d,

Whewell, Hist., II., 557, 588. Brande's Chem., I., 363. 2 IV., 287. 3 Hist. Civ., I., 367.

Thomson, Hist. Chem., I., 215.

the third is no other than the substance of air compressible and dilatable like the spring of a watch.

He made the first true statement of the nature of change in bodies,' showing the permanence of matter through all changes of form.

It is as difficult to analyze Boyle's influence on the best minds of his own and all succeeding centuries, as it is to find the effect upon the crop of the quality of the seed. It is the hidden secret of excellence; and I think so far as chemistry is concerned, it is certain that the Instauratio Magna would have shared the fate of other systems of abstract speculation, had not Robert Boyle given it practical efficiency through experimental demonstration.

The vastness and profundity of his learning coupled with his high social standing secured respect; the solidity of his judgments won confidence; the unusual spectacle of a man to whom all sensual indulgence was possible, renouncing all for learning's sake, and spending his powers for humanity's sake, begot enthusiastic admiration; the sweetness of his temper and the sensitiveness of his respect for other men, gave easy currency to his views; he was a "founder" in the largest sense; but I think his best and noblest service was the stimulus of his great example in obeying Lord Bacon's exhortation :

"If there be any man who has it at heart, not merely to take his stand on what has already been discovered, but to profit by that, and to go on to something beyond; — not to conquer an adversary by disputing but to conquer nature by working; not to opine probably and prettily, but to know certainly and demonstrably; —let such as being true sons of nature (if they will consent to do so) join themselves to us; so that leaving the porch of nature, which endless multitudes have so long trod, we may at last open a way to the inner courts."

'Works, III., 37.

Inst. Mag., Part II., Proef.

NOTE UPON THE PERFORATED INDIAN HUMERUS FOUND

AT CONCORD, MASS.

BY PROF. HENRY W. HAYNES.

This interesting relic was exhibited at the last meeting of this society, and its peculiarity was explained and commented upon by Dr. Woodward and other members.

It is important to observe that this perforation of the lower extremity of the humerus, which is so noticeable in the prehistoric races of America that it has been called a characteristic of the Mound-builders," is found to be equally prevalent among the prehistoric peoples of Europe. The percentages, however, indicative of its occurrence there, that have thus far been observed, are in no instance so high as the fifty per cent. which Dr. Gilman found to prevail in a mound in Michigan. I will give such of these as I have met with.

In the quaternary gravels of Grenelle, at Paris, M. Martin found the proportion to be twenty-eight per cent. In the caverns of the valley of the Lesse, in Belgium, in the case of the so-called fossil "race of Furfooz," M. Dupont found thirty per cent. to be the rule. M. Leguay observed the proportion to be twenty-five per cent. in the Dolmen of Argenteuil (near Paris); and Dr. Pruner-Bey found that it was twentysix per cent. in the neighboring one of Vaureal. He also reports that it is common in the skeletons of the Guanches, the ancient inhabitants of the Canary Islands, whose mummies are found in caverns there. In the sepulchral cave of Orrouy, belonging to the Age of Bronze, Dr. Broca found the proportion to amount to twenty-five per cent.' Among the two thousand skeletons, of the Age of Polished Stone, discovered by the Baron de Baye in Champagne, in artificial grottos excavated in the chalk, he reports it as very frequent.2

I have brought here for comparison one of these perforated humeri, which I took from one of the sepulchral grottos at Baye.

It will be noticed that this humerus from Baye is broken in the middle

'Compte rendu du Congrés International d'Anthropologie et d'Archéologie pré-historiques de Paris-(1867), p. 146.

2 L'Archéologie pré-historique, p. 203.