The Life of Dr. Robert Hooke.

Accordingly, I found a beginning of his life, which, though it affords but little satisfaction, being only concerning his childhood, yet I have here given an abstract of what is contained in it.

Dr. Robert Hooke was born at Freshwater, a peninsula on the west side of the Isle of Wight, on the eighteenth of July, being Saturday, 1635, at twelve o'clock at noon, and christened the twenty-sixth following by his own father, the minister of that parish.

He was very infirm and weakly, and therefore nursed at home, though his brothers and sisters were nursed abroad; and for at least seven years his parents had very little hope of his life, as he was often sick. During all that time, his chief food was milk or things made thereof, and fruits, as no meat in the least agreed with his weak constitution.

For his age, he was very sprightly and active in running, leaping, etc., though very weak as to any robust exercise. He was very apt to learn anything, and after his English, he soon learned his grammar by heart; but, as he says, with but little understanding, until his father, designing him for the ministry, took some pains to instruct him. But he was still often subject to the headache, which hindered his learning, so his father laid aside all thoughts of training him as a scholar. Finding himself also grow very infirm through age and sickness, his father wholly neglected his further education. Being thus left to himself, he spent his time in making little mechanical toys, as he says, in which he was very intent, and successful with the tools he had; so that there was nothing he saw done by any mechanic but he endeavored to imitate, and in some particulars could exceed (which are his own words). His father, observing by these indications his great inclination to mechanics, thought to put him apprentice to some easy trade (as a watchmaker's or limner's limner—a painter or illuminator), as he showed most inclination to those or the like curious mechanical performances. For, making use of such tools as he could procure, and seeing an old brass clock taken to pieces, he attempted to imitate it and made a wooden one that would go. Much about the same time he made a small ship about a yard long, fitting it properly and adding its rigging of ropes, pulleys, masts, etc., with a contrivance to make it fire off some small guns as it was sailing across a haven of a pretty breadth. He had also a great fancy for drawing, having much about the same age copied several prints with a pen, that Mr. Hoskins (son to the famous Hoskins, the master of Cooper original: "Hoskins Cowpers Master" — likely referring to the miniature painter Samuel Cooper.) much admired that one not instructed could so well imitate them.

These indications of a mechanical genius appeared in him when very young; for by the same paper I find that his father died in October 1648, having for three or four years before his death been much afflicted with a cough, a palsy, jaundice, and dropsy.

This is the sum of what he has left of his own writing, by which we find him, at the time of his father's death, to be thirteen years and about three months old.

This early propensity of his to mechanics was a sign of his future excellence in such contrivances, and the admirable facility he afterwards manifested in applying mechanical principles to the explanation of the most difficult phænomena phenomena of nature. I remember it has been often observed by several persons that whatever apparatus he contrived for exhibiting any experiment before the