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We have now to witness the diversified efforts of a company of men who, working for the most part independently, greatly added to the data of the physical sciences such men as Boyle, Huygens, Von Gericke, and Hooke. It will be found that the studies of these men covered the whole field of physical sciences as then understood the field of so-called natural philosophy.
Within the succeeding century Huygens made the application of the pendulum to clocks; Napier invented Logarithms; Descartes and Galileo created the analysis of curves, and the science of Dynamics; Leibnitz brought the Differential Calculus; Newton decomposed a ray of light, and synthesized Kepler's Laws into the theory of Universal Gravitation.
A novelty, nevertheless, to astronomers it still remained in 1656, when Huygens discerned, "as it were, an hiatus in the sky, affording a glimpse of a more luminous region beyond." Halley in 1716 knew of six nebulæ, which he believed to be composed of a "lucid medium" diffused through the ether of space. He appears, however, to have been unacquainted with some previously noticed by Hevelius.
And with this very force we actually find that bodies here upon earth do really descend; for a pendulum oscillating seconds in the latitude of Paris will be 3 Paris feet, and 8 lines 1/2 in length, as Mr. Huygens has observed.
Still later the celebrated Huygens hit upon the idea of using the melting and the boiling point of water as fixed points in a scale of measurements, which first gave definiteness to thermometric tests.
In fact, one was scarcely possible without the other, and as it happened it was the same man, Huygens, who perfected Kepler's telescope and invented the pendulum clock. The general idea had been suggested by Galileo; or, better perhaps, the equal time occupied by the successive oscillations of the pendulum had been noted by him.
"Ho! for an inn!" cried Peter as they stepped into the city. "Be brisk, my fine fellows!" Mynheer Kleef and His Bill of Fare This was the Rood Leeuw or Red Lion, kept by one Huygens Kleef, a stout Dutchman with short legs and a very long pipe. By this time they were in a ravenous condition.
Huygens, who above all other men was qualified to appreciate the new philosophy, rejected the doctrine of gravitation as existing between the individual particles of matter and received it only as an attribute of the planetary masses. John Bernouilli, one of the first mathematicians of his age, opposed the philosophy of Newton.
Hendrick, Hilda, Broom, Katy, Huygens, and Lucretia! And thy cousins, Wolfert, Diedrich, Mayken, Voost, and Katrina! Good children ye have been, in the main, since I last accosted ye. Diedrich was rude at the Haarlem fair last fall, but he has tried to atone for it since.
One of their peaks near the southern end of the range, Mount Huygens, is at least 18,000 feet high, and the black silhouettes of their sharp-pointed shadows thrown upon the smooth floor of the Mare Imbrium about the time of first quarter present a spectacle as beautiful as it is unique.
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