There are numerous other busts in other rooms, some of them stowed away in nooks and crannies, and the list of those selected for the library does not, perhaps, suggest that this is the room of honor, unless, indeed, the presence of Newton and Faraday gives it that stamp. But in the presence of the images of these two, and of Lyell, to go no farther, one feels a certain sacredness in the surroundings.
If this is true of the mere marble images, what shall we say of the emblems on the centre table? That little tubular affair, mounted on a globe, the whole cased in a glass frame perhaps two feet high, is the first reflecting telescope ever made, and it was shaped by the hand of Isaac Newton. The brass mechanism at the end of the next table is the perfected air-pump of Robert Boyle, Newton's contemporary, one of the founders of the Royal Society and one of the most acute scientific minds of any time. And here between these two mementos is a higher apparatus, with crank and wheel and a large glass bulb that make it conspicuous. This is the electrical machine of Joseph Priestley. There are other mementos of Newton--a stone graven with a sun-dial, which he carved as a boy, on the paternal manor-house; a chair, said to have been his, guarded here by a silk cord against profanation; bits of the famous apple-tree which, as tradition will have it, aided so tangibly in the greatest of discoveries; and the manuscript of the _Principia_ itself--done by the hand of an amanuensis, to be sure, but with interlinear corrections in the small, clear script of the master-hand itself. Here, too, is the famous death-mask, so much more interesting than any sculptured portrait, and differing so strangely in its broad-based nose and full, firm mouth from the over-refined lineaments of the sculptured bust close at hand. In a room not far away, to reach which one passes a score or two of portraits and as many busts of celebrities--including, by-the-bye, both bust and portrait of Benjamin Franklin--one finds a cabinet containing other mementos similar to those on the library tables. Here is the first model of Davy's safety-lamp; there a chronometer which aided Cook in his famous voyage round the world. This is Wollaston's celebrated "Thimble Battery." It will slip readily into the pocket, yet he jestingly showed it to a visitor as "his entire laboratory." That is a model of the double-decked boat made by Sir William Petty, and there beyond is a specimen of almost, if not quite, the first radiometer devised by Sir William Crookes.