Art. 1.-MR PEPYS AS A MAN OF SCIENCE AND 1. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. With an Introduction 3. An Address on the Medical History of Mr and Mrs June 1, 1895. 4. The Life of Sir Robert Moray, Soldier, Statesman, and Man of Science (1608-1673). By Alexander Robertson. Longmans, 1922. 5. The History of the Royal Society of London, for the 6. A History of the Royal Society, with Memoirs of the And other works. PEPYS was a man with many sides to his character Indeed, he presented so many facets to the world that he appears to have been almost globular. Numerous articles have been written on Pepys as a Diarist, Pepys as 'a lover of musique,' Pepys and the Navy, etc., but I do not think that hitherto any one has dealt with him as a man of science. It is true that Mr Percy Lubbock tells us that he was in no sense a scientist' (horrid word!), but one has to consider what science was in Pepys's day. It was in the reign of the Stewarts that Vol. 245.-No. 486. ، from a general amalgam of knowledge the sciences were slowly crystallising out, and from a mingled mass of learning, mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, zoology, agriculture, and even physiology were beginning to assert claims to an individual and separate existence. The specialist was beginning to emerge from those who hitherto had taken all knowledge' to be their 'province.' The biological sciences in a peculiar way owed their ancestry to medicine, though the huntsman and the agriculturalist supplied their quota. Part of the great advancement that was being made in science during the 17th century was the result and partly the cause of the invention of many new instruments without whose aid little progress could have been made. The air-pump, the barometer, the thermometer, all came into being in the earlier part of this century, and were soon available for all who cared to use them. In 1664 Pepys purchased 'a microscope and a scotoscope. For the first I did give him 57. 10s., a great price, but a most curious bauble it is, and he says, as good, nay, the best he knows in England. The other he gives me, and is of value; and a curious curiosity it is to discover objects in a dark room with.' Two years later, on Aug. 19, 1666, comes by agreement Mr Reeves, bringing me a lantern'-it must have been a magic lantern-' with pictures in glass, to make strange things appear on a wall, very pretty.' If the great painters and writers of Elizabeth's time were not followed under the Stewarts by similar masters of their craft the balance was redressed on the side of science. Harvey and Newton replaced Dr Dee (one of whose books Pepys acquired) and Edward Kelly. Science was then the object of an insatiable curiosity, perhaps in a way childish. But it was collecting and recording the facts which later investigators could classify, systematise, and analyse. The sum of knowledge was not very great and specialisation had hardly begun. It was perfectly easy for a professor of those days to explain to an educated man the nature of his problem and how he proposed to solve it. Specialisation has now reached so high a degree that even very few experts can thoroughly grasp Einstein's theory of relativity, and it would take a long time to explain to a mathematician the complicated process of karyokinesis. Pepys was gifted with an undying and insatiable curiosity. Nothing was too trivial or too odd for his notice and record. His life was one long series of ecstasies. Being as he was a high official in the Admiralty anything to do with ships or the sea excited his interest. On March 14, 1662, he tells us, 'In the afternoon came the German, Dr Kuffler,* to discourse with us about his engine to blow up ships.' A year later he records : 'To the Trinity House, and there dined, where, among other discourse worth hearing among the old seamen, they y tell us that they have catched often in Greenland whales with the iron grapnels that had formerly been struck into their bodies covered over with fat; that they have had eleven hogheads of oil out of the tongue of a whale.' Although he knew nothing about microscopic protozoa which are largely responsible for phosphorescence of the ocean, he yet records the fact: 'I was astonished, and so were we all, at the strange nature of the sea-water in a dark night, that it seemed like fire upon every stroke of the oar, and, they say, is a sign of wind.' Pepys was one of those selected to accompany the Commissioners on their trip to Holland to bring back Charles II and his Court, and he returned with them in most glorious weather to Dover, the King's vessel being surrounded by a convoy of thirty ships. It was about this time that his patron Lord Montagu said to him in his cabin one day: 'And we will rise together; in the meantime I will do you all the good jobs I can.' And shortly after he fulfilled his words, for Pepys was appointed to the Secretaryship of the Naval Board. His duties consisted in managing the mysteries of accounting, the rating of ships, the fixing of contracts, the checking of timber and measurements. Any one of these can have been no light task, and it is rather astonishing to learn that it was only on July 4, 1662, when Pepys was in his thirtieth year, that he began to learn the first four rules of arithmetic. On that date: 'Comes Mr Cooper, mate of the Royal Charles,' of whom *He must have been a Prussian. I intend to learn mathematics, and do begin with him to-day, he being a very able man; and no great matter, I suppose, will content him. After an hour's being with him at arithmetic (my first attempt being to learn the multiplicationtable); then we parted till to-morrow.' In spite of this remarkable lack of knowledge in the chief study of his University he was awarded on June 22 his Cambridge M.A. in absentia. As the words of the Grace record, he was excused attendance, being apud mare adeo occupatissimus. Although Pepys was much given to dalliance he was desperately jealous of his wife, and the jealousy must have reached a climax when his wife was taking lessons with Mr Pembleton the dancing-master. To distract her attention Pepys decided to teach his wife arithmetic, and before long he remarks: 'She is come to do Addition, common Subtraction and Multiplication very well, I purpose not to trouble her yet with Division; but to begin with Globes to her now.' One would, as usual, like to know what Mrs Pepys thought of it all. I cannot help feeling that she would have shared the opinion of Marjorie Fleming, 'I am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege [plague] that my multiplication gives me you can't conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself cant endure.' Although not a great mathematician himself he was a friend of Edward Cocker, an arithmetician whose name lingered on to my boyhood. According to Cocker' was then a frequent saying. When he wanted tables engraved upon his new slide rule it was to Cocker he went, and Pepys was immensely surprised at the skill and ability which the latter showed. He also took a keen interest in mechanical devices, and was much pleased to observe several engines that worked to draw up water as he walked through St James's Park. Above all the rest he liked that of Mr Greatorex, 'which do carry up the water with a great deal of ease.' His troubled eyesight which led him to bring his Diary to an end caused him to take great interest in all optical instruments. On Aug. 7, 1666, 'Comes Mr Reeve, with a twelve-foot glass. Up to the top of the house, and there we endeavoured to see the moon, and Saturn, and Jupiter; but the heavens proved cloudy, and so we lost our labour, having taken pains to get things together, in order to the managing of our long glass.' And at a later date we find him on the leads studying astronomy: 'I find Reeves there, it being a mighty fine bright night, and so upon my leads, though very sleepy, till one in the morning, looking on the moon and Jupiter, with his twelvefoot glass, and another of six foot that he hath brought with him to-night, and the sights mighty pleasant, and one of the glasses I will buy.' A few days later (Aug. 19, 1666) he continues his study with Mr Reeves, this time, as he records, on the Lord's Day: 'We did also at night see Jupiter and his girdle and satelites, very fine, with my twelve-foot glass, but not Saturn, he being very dark. Spong and I also had several fine discourses upon the globes this afternoon, particularly why the fixed stars do not rise and set at the same hour all the year long, which he could not demonstrate, nor I neither.' On Oct. 24, after some scandal about the Duke of York and the Lord Chancellor's daughter, Pepys relates how he went to Mr Greatorex and found there Mr Spong and he did show me the manner of the lamp-glasses, which carry the light a great way, good to read in bed by, and I intend to have one of them.' According to Sir d'Arcy Power, Pepys suffered from hypermetropia, a congenital or acquired error of refraction of the eye. To this was added in later life presbyobia, or the impairment of the power of accommodation in the eyes. This was progressive, and the two together probably accounts for his having to give up writing his beloved diary. As his eyes grew worse he consulted the King's Physician, Waldron, an Oxford M.D. He met him and others at an alehouse, including 'Turberville my physician for the eyes, and Lowre, to dissect several eyes of sheep and oxen, with great pleasure, and to my great information. But strange that this Turberville should be so great a man, and yet to this day had seen no eyes dissected, or but once, but desired this Dr Lowre to give him the opportunity to see him dissect some.' |