THE ROYAL SOCIETY: THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL.
The Royal Society was formed with the avowed object of increasing knowledge by direct experiment; and it is worthy of remark, that the charter granted by Charles II. to this celebrated institution declares that its object is the extension of natural knowledge, as opposed to that which is supernatural.
Dr. Paris (_Life of Sir H. Davy_, vol. ii. p. 178) says: “The charter of the Royal Society states that it was established for the improvement of _natural_ science. This epithet _natural_ was originally intended to imply a meaning, of which very few persons, I believe, are aware. At the period of the establishment of the society, the arts of witchcraft and divination were very extensively encouraged; and the word _natural_ was therefore introduced in contradistinction to _supernatural_.”
After the death of Bacon, one of the most distinguished Englishmen was certainly Robert Boyle, who, if compared with his contemporaries, may be said to rank immediately below Newton, though of course very inferior to him as an original thinker. Boyle was the first who instituted exact experiments into the relation between colour and heat; and by this means not only ascertained some very important facts, but laid a foundation for that union between optics and thermotics, which, though not yet completed, now merely waits for some great philosopher to strike out a generalisation large enough to cover both, and thus fuse the two sciences into a single study. It is also to Boyle, more than to any other Englishman, that we owe the science of hydrostatics in the state in which we now possess it.[3] He is also the original discoverer of that beautiful law, so fertile in valuable results, according to which the elasticity of air varies as its density. And, in the opinion of one of the most eminent modern naturalists, it was Boyle who opened up those chemical inquiries which went on accumulating until, a century later, they supplied the means by which Lavoisier and his contemporaries fixed the real basis of chemistry, and enabled it for the first time to take its proper stand among those sciences that deal with the external world.--_Buckle’s History of Civilization_, vol. i.