Charles Morton 1

By Samuel Eliot Morison

IN the early part of the seventeenth century, a young gentleman from Quarrendon, Bucks, named Nicholas Morton, entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge.2 There he obtained a scholarship, took his B.A. in 1615/16, obtained a Dixie fellowship, and commenced M.A. in 1619.3 It seems probable that he retained his fellowship and residence until November, 1621, when he became rector of St. Ives in the Deanery of East Cornwall.4 After living there some years he married, at Egloshayle, Frances, only daughter of Thomas Kestell of Pendavy, a Cornish squire.5 Their first child, Charles Morton, was. born at Pendavy, at the house of his maternal grandparents, and baptized at Egloshayle on February 15, 1626/27.6

A few months before this event Nicholas Morton had been promoted to the rectory of a large London parish: St. Saviour’s, in Southwark (now Southwark Cathedral), very near the Surrey end of London Bridge. There, doubtless, the mother came to join her husband as soon as baby Charles was able to travel.

Among the few respectable families in the rather disreputable parish of St. Saviour’s were the Harvards. And they were much fewer than they had been a few years before Morton came to Southwark. The plague of 1625 took Robert Harvard, a prosperous butcher and the head of the family, three of his sons, and two of his daughters, leaving only the mother and two sons, John and Thomas. The widow Harvard had already become Mrs. Elletson at the time Morton became rector, and upon Elletson’s death after a six months’ marriage, she took for third husband Richard Yearwood, grocer, of St. Saviour’s parish.7

The new rector seems at once to have struck up a warm friendship with the surviving Harvards. Both he and his wife were named legatees in the wills of Thomas Harvard and Mrs. Yearwood; Morton was associated with John Harvard as executor of Thomas’s will.8 And as the Harvards had no previous university connections, one may assume that Morton was responsible for John’s entering Emmanuel College, and that the two kept in close touch until John sailed for New England. It is a strange coincidence that Charles Morton, whom John Harvard must have seen as a baby, eventually became pastor of the church at Charlestown in the Massachusetts Bay where John was preaching at the time of his death on September 14, 1638.

Charles’s mother died after bearing three more children: John, Nicholas, and a daughter.9 Their father married for second wife Elizabeth King of Southwark. Nicholas Morton died in 1640, still “minister of the word of God at St Saviours, Southwark,” leaving to each of his three sons “two pair of sheets” and an income of £30 a year from his estate during the widowhood of his second wife; at her death or marriage the estate was to be divided among his sons.10

Charles was now fourteen years old. It is probable that he and his younger brothers went to live with their grandfather or their uncle John Kestell at Pendavy,11 since their residence is given as Egloshayle when they entered the universities. Cornish by birth, and half Cornish in blood, Charles looked the part: he and his brothers grew into “tall black men,” typical Cornishmen.12

Apparently Charles encountered some difficulty in preparing for the university, since he was already twenty years old in 1646 when he entered Queen’s College, Cambridge, as a pensioner. Cambridge was under Puritan control throughout the Great Rebellion; and Oxford, after serving as royalist capital, surrendered to Sir Thomas Fairfax in June, 1646. Parliament left the university to itself for almost a year. Twenty-four Visitors were then appointed to take measures to bring it in tune with the new régime. All the resources of delay, obstruction, and procrastination, in which men of learning are so rich, were eventually exhausted; and in March, 1647/48, the Visitors really got down to work. The salutary reforms that they effected in the university do not concern us here; for the main thing that affected Charles Morton was a general purgation of the colleges. Several hundred royalists—scholars, fellows, lecturers, professors, and heads of houses—who refused to submit to parliamentary authority, had to depart and yield their places to men faithful, at least outwardly, to the parliamentary government.13 These “intruded” fellows, professors, and heads, as they were called, were in great part Cambridge Puritans who flocked in from the “less ancient and splendid institution” to enjoy the rich fruits of ancient foundations at Oxford. Not a few Harvard men shared in the bounty; two of the earliest being William Stoughton, the future lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, who obtained a fellowship at New College in 1652, and Samuel Mather, chaplain of Magdalen College, whom Morton remembered thirty-five years later when writing to Samuel’s brother Increase.14

Among the “rude and pragmatical persons” (as Anthony Wood called them)15 who swarmed into Oxford from Cambridge, was our Charles Morton. For why should he stay at Cambridge to take his degree when scholarships and fellowships at Oxford were going a-begging? We first find Morton in Oxford at New Inn Hall in 1648, when he made his formal submission to the Visitors.16 On September 7, 1649, he was admitted a scholar at Wadham College, of which John Wilkins was the “intruded” warden.17 He was allowed to count the terms he had kept at Cambridge toward the Bachelor of Arts degree, to which he was admitted on November 6, 1649. In 1652 he took his M.A. in course, and the next year was incorporated ad eundem in his original alma mater.18

As scholar of Wadham, Charles Morton’s lot had fallen in pleasant places. Wadham College, built in 1610–1613, was one of the most modern and luxurious collegiate foundations in England; and it has remained almost unchanged in appearance to this day, save for the mark of age on the soft Headington stone of which it is built. Chambers and studies were more commodious than in the older colleges; the Hall was the second largest in Oxford; the chapel had the spaciousness of the great Somersetshire churches; kitchen and offices were ample. A formal garden, with walks radiating from a mound surmounted by a figure of Atlas holding a globe, separated the quadrangle from open country where the tiny Cherwell flowed between green fields to join the Isis. Indeed, so pleasant did Charles find Wadham that his younger brother Nicholas came there too, in 1650, and remained until 1656, until he had taken both degrees.

If Morton’s tastes were not scientific before he came to Oxford, he had come into the very milieu to turn them in that direction. For Oxford in the middle of the seventeenth century was much more friendly to experimental science—the “New Philosophy”—than Cambridge; and Wadham College was the scientific center of Oxford. Around 1645 the group of virtuosi known as the “Invisible College,” which is generally regarded as the nucleus of the Royal Society, began holding meetings in London, one of their rules being that all subjects could be discussed but politics and religion. That was a difficult rule to maintain in the turbulent metropolis; and in 1648–1649, when new opportunities for income and leisure opened up at Oxford, most of the members shifted their residence to that university, and formed an “Oxford Philosophical Society.”19

A mere list, as given here, of the prominent or promising scientists at Oxford in Morton’s day, the “Oxonian Sparkles” who met either at Petty’s lodgings or at the warden’s lodgings at Wadham, will show the scientific influences to which Morton was exposed. Those with an asterisk prefixed were of the twelve who met at Gresham College on November 28, 1660, and formed the organization that obtained a charter in 1662 as the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. Most of the others were elected fellows of the Royal Society at an early date.

*John Wilkins (1614–1672), author of A Discourse tending to prove that tis probable our Earth is one of the Planets (1640), and of Mathematical Magick (1648), was appointed warden of Wadham College by the parliamentary Visitors in 1648. He married a sister of Oliver Cromwell in 1651. Later he became Bishop of Chester.

Seth Ward (1617–1689), mathematical astronomer, followed Wilkins from London to Oxford and entered Wadham as a fellow-commoner. He lived in the chamber over the gateway at Wadham afterwards occupied by Christopher Wren.20 In 1649, the same year that Ward took his M.A., he was appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy.

John Wallis (1616–1703), mathematician, came to Oxford at the same time as Wilkins and in 1649 was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry.

Thomas Willis (1621–1675), anatomist and physician, took his first medical degree at Oxford in 1646 and resided there through the Interregnum, constantly experimenting.

*Lawrence Rooke (1622–1662), astronomer, took his M.A. at Cambridge in 1647 and entered Wadham as a fellow-commoner in 1650. He left in 1652 to become professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London.

*Robert Boyle (1627–1691), the great chemist and philanthropist, settled at Oxford in 1654 and took charge of the Philosophical Society in 1659, when Wilkins left to be master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

*Sir William Petty (1623–1687), anatomist and economist, came to Oxford in 1648, took his M.D. the next year, and became fellow of Brasenose, deputy professor of anatomy, and, in 1651, professor of anatomy. He went to Ireland in 1652.

*Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), scientist and architect, entered Wadham College in 1649, the same year with Morton, and became fellow of All Souls on taking his M.A. in 1653.

* Jonathan Goddard (1617–1675), physician and maker of telescopes, was warden of Merton College, 1651–1660.

Thomas Sprat (1635–1713), historian of the Royal Society, entered Wadham in 1651, and took his M.A. in 1657.

Gilbert Ironside (1632–1701), second of the name to become Bishop of Bristol, entered as scholar of Wadham in 1650, and took his M.A. in 1653.

Walter Pope (d 1714), astronomer, was made a scholar of Wadham by the Visitors in 1648. He took his M.A. in 1652 and was a fellow of Wadham, 1651–1652. He was a half-brother of Warden Wilkins, and succeeded Rooke as professor of astronomy at Gresham College, being the third Wadham man in succession to hold the post.

Samuel Lee (1625–1691), a learned divine, “well acquainted with chemistry and physics,” was fellow of Wadham, 1649–1657, and as bursar and sub-warden of the college brought its accounts into good shape. Cromwell made him minister of St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. Lee and Morton were friends at Wadham—Wood mentions their sharing “an urne of coines” found in a wood near Stanton St. John21—and from 1678 Lee was minister of a Congregational church at Newington Green, and so neighbor of Morton. He sailed for New England in the same summer as Morton, though in a different ship, and became minister of Bristol, Rhode Island. Morton visited him there, but declined his invitation to preach to the “spiritual beares in Rhode Island”—the Baptists.22 Lee made sage observations of political and natural phenomena in New England, which he communicated to his friend Dr. Nathaniel Grew.23

Charles Morton’s name is not found in the writings of the Wadham scientists, so far as I can discover; and he was not a member of their Oxford Philosophical Society or later a fellow of the Royal Society, although he contributed to their Philosophical Transactions24 a short paper on “The Improvement of Cornwall by Sea-Sand.” Edmund Calamy, the non-conformists’ biographer, states that Morton was “extremely valued by Dr. Wilkins for his mathematical genius”;25 but as Calamy also makes Morton a fellow of Wadham, which the records show to be incorrect, we need not take this statement too seriously.26 Still, in view of the close relationship that then existed between all members of a college, it seems hardly possible that a student in a small academic community of fifty or sixty members, where scientific tastes were encouraged by the authorities, can have failed to receive guidance and inspiration. Scientific enthusiasm ran so high at Wadham that it spread even to the servants. Christopher Brooke the manciple, whose ingenuity was encouraged by Warden Wilkins, invented a new quadrant!27

How long Charles Morton remained in residence at Wadham is not known. Possibly he was still there in July, 1654, when John Evelyn visited Oxford; “supped at a magnificent entertainment in Wadham Hall, invited by my dear and excellent friend Dr. Wilkins”; met “that miracle of a youth Mr. Christopher Wren”; and, later, “dined with that most obliging and universally-curious Dr. Wilkins at Wadham College,” by whom he was shown a variety of “dials, perspectives, and many other artificial, mathematical, and magical curiosities, a way-wiser, a thermometer, a monstrous magnet, conic and other sections, a balance on a demi-circle; most of them his own….”28

But Morton was probably absent on that interesting occasion; for his latest biographer believes that he is identical with the Charles Morton who was vicar of Takeley, Essex, in February, 1652/53.29 The Church of England at this time was Presbyterian, and Morton, as a recent Oxford M.A. and a Puritan, was a likely candidate for an ecclesiastical living.

If our Morton was identical with the Charles Morton who was vicar of Takeley, he did not remain there long; for in 1655 the Presbyterian party in the parish of Blisland, Cornwall, ejected the then incumbent, and installed Charles Morton. Blisland was only six or seven miles from Pendavy, the seat of the Kestells, where Morton had spent part of his childhood. At the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, these Blisland proceedings were naturally declared void, and a new rector was installed.30

For a time Morton lived at St. Ives, where his father had been rector, in a small tenement of his own, and preached privately to a few people from a neighboring village until 1666. Losses from the Great Fire of London then made it expedient that he move thither in order to take care of his property.31

During the next nine years there is but one trace of Morton’s movements. On April 12, 1672, he was licensed to preach at his home in Kennington, a suburb of London.32 This meant that he was acting pastor to a small neighborhood church of dissenters, as the old Puritans and others were called who refused conformity to the restored Anglican Church.

At this period the dissenters were setting up academies of higher learning where their sons, excluded from the universities by the Test Acts, could have an education of university grade. “About 1675”33 Morton opened an academy in a well-appointed house at Newington Green, in Stoke Newington, a suburb of London.

These dissenting academies, starting free from the trammels of obsolete statutes and ancient usage, were the most advanced schools of higher learning in England. They introduced the study of modern languages and gave more attention to natural science than did the universities.

Morton’s Newington Green academy was reckoned one of the best, if not the best, in England; and something more is known about it because two of Morton’s pupils, Samuel Wesley and Daniel Defoe, became famous. Both men in their writings praised Morton and the academy. Other pupils of Morton whose names are to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography are Timothy Cruso, the “golden preacher of Crutched Friars,” and John Shower, pastor at Old Jewry.34

Newington Green was the central square of an ancient village called Stoke Newington, between Highbury and Hackney. London has long since spread out and engulfed the region; but in Morton’s time it was a rural neighborhood, with many gentlemen’s country estates nearby. Wesley says that the Newington Green academy had “a fine Garden, Bowling Green, Fish-pond, and within a Laboratory, and some not inconsiderable Rarities with Air Pumps, thermometers, and all sorts of Mathematical Instruments.”35 There were about fifty students in the academy in his day, including even a few of the nobility, but on the whole, according to Wesley, rather a “republican” lot. The future rector of Epworth was shocked when a gang of his schoolmates tried out one of Master Morton’s pieces of apparatus, a speaking trumpet, bellowing forth insults to the local Anglican clergyman from a neighboring hill.

Wesley has recorded part of a doggerel rhyme that he made up of the names of some of the books that he had to study, most of which were read by Harvard students at the same period:

Sthalius, et Suarez, Gassendus cum Zabarella,

Et Keckermannus, tuque Hereborde Pater!

Hisce Opus immortale tuum, Venerande Cracanthorp!

Scheiblerique ingens, Smiglecijque Labor.

Carolus et Morton; Mortonius inclytus, et Tu,

Carole! etc.36

Daniel Defoe complained that he missed at Newington Green the witty conversation of the universities, but he praised Morton for conducting scholastic exercises in English, and training the students in the use of their mother tongue. Another method of which Morton made great use was compiling “systems” of various arts and sciences, which his pupils copied for their own use as text-books. These, says Calamy, were “always brief and compendious,” Morton “being a declar’d Enemy to large Volumes; as he signified by that Saying which was often in his Mouth, Μεγὰ βιβλίον μεγὰ κακὸν—A great Book is a great Evil.”37 Defoe as late as 1704 preserved Morton’s system of “Politicks” and a “Manuscript of Science” which can have been none other than our Compendium Physicae.38

As an instance of Morton’s liberalism, it may be noted that he had his ministerial pupils read some of the works of John Biddle, the first English Unitarian, who was regarded as a sort of antichrist by Anglicans and dissenters alike. Young Samuel Wesley was set to translate some of Biddle’s Latin works. His pious nineteenth-century biographer thought it very fortunate that Wesley was not ruined by these “pernicious writings,” and became the founder of Methodism instead of a “cold-hearted sceptic.”39

By one of the dissenters’ historians Morton is described as a natural teacher, “a pious, learned and ingenious man, of a sweet natural temper and a generous public spirit, beloved and valued by all that knew him,”40 caring nothing for fame or money, only wishing to be allowed to teach quietly. This he was not long permitted to do. The dissenting academies were soon to suffer persecution from the authorities, egged on by the jealous universities. Masters and tutors like Morton who were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were held by churchmen to have violated the so-called “Stamford Oath,” which they took on commencing M.A., never to teach in any university except Oxford or Cambridge;41 and efforts were made to inflict the pains and penalties of perjury on them for a technical violation of an academic oath which had been regarded as a joke for three centuries. Local magistrates, eager to curry favor with the government, harassed the dissenting academies for petty violations of the law; spite suits and all the means of persecution that a dominant group has at its disposal to molest an unpopular minority were used to discourage these excellent institutions of learning. Edward Veel, sometime student of Christ Church and fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, was so harassed by the authorities that he gave up his academy at Stepney in 1680; Morton held out five years longer. He was excommunicated, apprehended on a capias, and placed in custody, from which he escaped through the death of the officer in charge of him.42 He made an excellent defense against violating the oath, pointing out that the Church had never objected to Oxford graduates lecturing in houses of the nobility, or publicly at Gresham College; and that the dissenting academies pretended to none of the privileges of universities, such as conferring degrees.43 The protection of powerful friends obtained him a certain respite; but at length he became “so infested with Processes from the Bishops Court” that when a new opportunity arose for usefulness overseas, he embraced it eagerly and sailed for New England. Had he held out two years more, the Declaration of Indulgence of James II (1687) would have protected him and given the Newington Green academy a new lease of life.44

The First Church in Charlestown, one of the oldest churches in the Bay Colony, was without a pastor in 1685 because of the death of Thomas Shepard, third of that name. The church decided to give Charles Morton a tentative call; and on August 4 Increase Mather, on the strength of having met Morton on a journey from the West Country to London many years before, wrote him in England, enclosing an invitation from Samuel Nowell of Charlestown. From the tenor of Morton’s reply, it seems that Mather also intimated that the Harvard presidency was vacant. That important office had been going begging ever since President Hoar had been driven out of it by a tutor-and-student strike in 1675. Urian Oakes had been prevailed upon to take it after long holding back; but he died in 1681. John Rogers took it the next year, and died in 1684. After a year’s vacancy and several offers and refusals, Increase Mather consented to act as president pro tempore in June, 1685, but continued to reside in Boston and minister to his church there. The college was in a “low and languishing state” with a mere handful of students, and much wanted the invigoration of a good scholar and administrator who would give his undivided attention to the job.

Morton replied to Mather on October 10, 1685, that he was ready to serve God in New England in any capacity he might; and that as a pledge of good will he was sending out as bearer of the letter his nephew Nicholas Morton to finish his education at Harvard College.45 It was some months before Charles Morton (now turned sixty) could put his affairs in order, wind up the Newington Green academy, and leave for New England; but he was ready to sail in April, 1686, and arrived at Boston about the first day of June.46 With him were his wife, his daughter Mary, his nephew Charles (a physician), and a young disciple, Samuel Penhallow, who had an appointment from the New England Company to do missionary work among the Indians. John Dunton, the Boston bookseller, writes that “the News of his Arrival was received here with Extraordinary Joy by the People in general.”47

Henry Horsey of Newington Green (from whose letter we glean these facts), and Penhallow in his autobiography48 agree that Morton came over with the Harvard presidency “in prospect”; and so Edward Randolph wrote home from Boston.49 Horsey added that William Stoughton and Joseph Dudley knew Morton well. The first, as has been seen, may have been an Oxford friend; and both had probably seen much of him on their missions to England, for Massachusetts delegates were always well received and entertained by their dissenting brethren in the Old Country.

During the twelve months that elapsed between Mather’s invitation and Morton’s arrival, the posture of affairs in New England had changed. The Massachusetts Bay charter had been vacated, and it was assumed that the college charter went with it: “the calf died in the cow’s belly,” as it was bluntly said. Massachusetts Bay was combined with other colonies as the Dominion of New England, and ruled over by a royal governor and council. Joseph Dudley took office at Boston on May 25, 1686, as president of the Council for New England. In that juncture it would have been unwise for the Harvard Corporation to attempt the choice of a president, and presumptuous folly to elect a person so decidedly non grata to the king. President Dudley and his council dealt with the situation themselves by ordering (July 23, 1686) Increase Mather to continue as head of the college with the title of rector. So Morton accepted the call to the church of Charlestown, and was installed as pastor on November 5, 1686. Increase Mather and Joshua Moody, who officiated on that occasion, and Judge Sewall, who was present—as on all such occasions—took it ill that Morton refused to let the attendant clerics “lay hands” on him after the New England fashion; and said so bluntly.50 But Morton conformed in all essentials to the New England way, and had a most successful ministry of twelve years, in which there were 623 baptisms and 59 admissions to full communion.51

Thus, after almost fifty years, the old neighborhood association of the Harvards and the Mortons was renewed. Charles Morton, son of John Harvard’s patron and rector, was now pastor of John Harvard’s church. He did not, however, live in John Harvard’s old house, which was occupied by the widow of the previous pastor, Thomas Shepard.52 Morton, who seems to have been comfortably well off at all periods of his life, built himself a new parsonage. In October, 1691, Judge Sewall dined there with Mr. and Mrs. Morton shortly after they had moved in. At the table were the Reverend and Mrs. Joshua Moody, the Reverend James Allen (a contemporary of Morton at Oxford), the Reverend John Bailey and his son, and Lady Phips.53

Morton seemed to fit himself in snugly with his New England neighbors. Edward Randolph considered him one of the “faction” or gang who refused complete submission to the new royal government of Andros. In a memorable sermon preached in September, 1687, Morton assured the people of Charlestown that “the rulers of Jerusalem were unjustly set aside,” the old colony charter was still valid, and “it would not be long before God restored their ancient Magistrates.”54 In consequence he was ordered by the council to attend and answer for “seditious expressions and a seditious sermon,” and bound over in £500 to take his trial at the next Superior Court.55 The trial was held in Boston because the authorities believed that, as they expressed it, “there were not honest men enough in Middlesex” to put Mr. Morton away. Nevertheless, the Boston jury acquitted him of sedition, to the great delight of those whom Randolph called the “factious rabble.”56 On Morton the effect was to enhance his popularity, and to identify him completely with this transatlantic community that he had joined so late in life.

It was perhaps fortunate that Morton did not obtain the college presidency. Eminently qualified as he was, in learning, by experience, and by reason of his “excellent sweet natural temper” and “loving and generous spirit,”57 he might have found the college a cross, not a crown to his career. The last imported president, Leonard Hoar, who dreamed of making Harvard the New-World home of experimental science, found the Harvard students impossible to manage. Harvard was in good hands under two able young tutors, John Leverett and William Brattle (Mather being largely a figurehead and long absent in England). Through his Compendium Physicae and his residence at Charlestown, where he could always be consulted on scientific and theological topics, Morton became a great and salutary influence on the college without having the burden and vexation of the presidency.

Morton had brought over a set of his manuscript outlines with him,58 and the Compendium Physicae seems to have been adopted at Harvard shortly after his arrival. The title page of one of the earliest copies contains the date 1687, and the theses physicae on the Harvard Commencement broadside that year prove that the Compendium had already affected the scientific outlook at Harvard for the better. Of the thirty-seven theses physicae in 1687—eight of them marked for debate—several can be traced directly to Morton’s Compendium:

Gravitas est vix attractrix terrae.

Radii luminosi sunt corporei.

From the same source are several of the others:

Corpora densa lucem reddunt, minus densa imbibunt.

Generatio est principium Corruptionis.

Pisces respirant per attractionem & remissionem aeris.

Sonus nihil aliud est, nisi motus corporis realis.

From this time on, the modern note prevails in Harvard Commencement theses physicae; they deal with heat, light, motion, gravity, magnetism, the conservation of matter, mechanics, and other topics of experimental science. Morton’s Compendium was copied and recopied by students; it is found in the programme of studies in 1723; and several copies are found with marks of Harvard and Yale ownership at an even later date. With Morton’s help, Harvard College pulled out of the bog of medieval science, and set her face toward experimental philosophy and the “century of enlightenment.”

Morton had too much of the teacher’s instinct to confine himself to the pastoral office. Penhallow and Morton’s nephew Charles, instead of enrolling at Harvard, continued under Morton’s tutelage; and these private “philosophical lectures” in the Charlestown parsonage almost led to the establishment of another private academy. “Several from the College” came to hear his lectures. But Morton soon discovered that Harvard was quite as jealous of his competition as Oxford had been. In December, 1686, after John Emerson of the sophomore class had been punished for negligence in studies, his father removed him to Mr. Morton’s. Rector Mather and the Harvard tutors then addressed a sharp letter to Morton, declaring that it would be “very offensive” to them, and “no small reflection” on him if he should “enterteyn” such students. Morton, in his kindly way, took the hint, and received no more Harvard students.59

In the successive imperfect charters under which Harvard College was governed from 1692 to 1700, Morton was either a fellow or vice-president. As fellow of the Corporation under the charter of 1692, he attended every meeting but three. He was named vice-president in the charter of 1696, which the Corporation rejected; and he was named vice-president in the charter of 1697, but, doubtless from declining health, attended but one meeting.60 The only action associated with his name in the college records was the introduction at the Corporation meeting of October 2, 1693, of a discussion on the question, “How may the Colledge be made greater and better?” After his proposals had been read and considered, Morton, Leverett, and Brattle were appointed a committee “to make A Model, and to draw up Som proposalls for the Enlargment of the Colledge by new buildings.”61 Their report has not been found; not improbably it started the movement which resulted in the building of Stoughton College in 1699 as a gift of Morton’s old friend, William Stoughton.

This movement for a bigger and better Harvard had already been debated at the Cambridge Ministerial Association which Morton had founded, and of which he was one of the leading spirits. Over thirty years before, as vicar of Blisland in Cornwall, he had been secretary of an association of Cornish ministers. The book of records, ending in 1659, Morton brought over with him to Charlestown, and as the greater part of the pages were still blank, he used them for the records of the Cambridge Ministerial Association, which he organized at Charlestown on October 13, 1690. It included all the ministers of Boston and the neighboring towns. They met at the college about every six weeks and discussed matters of ecclesiastical and general public interest.62

Morton appears to have seen eye-to-eye with his New England colleagues on all questions, including the momentous one of witchcraft that flared up in 1692. His ideas on witchcraft did not differ from those of other educated men in England of his day and generation; he doubted not its existence; he believed that people could confederate with the Devil, and in so doing justly incurred the penalty of death; but he thought that judicial processes for the detecting of witchcraft should be conducted with great care. Since the appearance of Professor Kittredge’s book, it is no longer necessary to argue that a man of learning, cognizant of the new experimental philosophy, could take this attitude honestly and (so far as he himself could judge) consistently. Witchcraft was a phenomenon, like the phenomena of motion, heat, and light, which should not be ignored, but must be faced and investigated. The evidence of its existence was quite as strong (so far as men of that time could judge) as that for planetary motion or the molecular structure of matter. It is difficult, with our modern prepossessions, to avoid the feeling that Morton, as an English schoolmaster in touch with the latest scientific developments, should have quenched the superstitious zeal of his “bigoted” New England brethren with the cold water of scientific scepticism. Actually, the converse is true. Robert Boyle, and doubtless most of the old scientific group at Wadham College, believed in witchcraft;63 and the man responsible for the revival in witchcraft literature near the end of the century was a fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvil. His Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681) “was thought to have put the belief in apparitions and witchcraft on an unshakable basis of science and philosophy.”64 Indeed it was the people who composed what one might call the Cambridge Scientific Club of that day—Morton, Willard, Stoughton, and the Mathers—who took the keenest interest in witchcraft. If the Boston and Salem clergy had been more old-fashioned and less curious respecting phenomena, we might never have had the hangings of 1692. The fatal expansion of a neighborhood quarrel into a popular panic occurred when the “afflicted” girls of Salem Village discovered that their antics obtained attention and publicity for themselves from the leading intellectuals of the province.65

The prelude to the Salem frenzy was the Goodwin witchcraft case in Boston in 1688. Morton was one of the five or six ministers who concerned themselves with curing the afflicted children by fasting and prayer;66 and he was one of the four who signed the preface to Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft (Boston, 1689), which described the Goodwin case and others.67 Although no causal connection between this tract and the Salem Village outbreak of 1692 can be proved, there is some reason to suspect that Ann Putnam and the other young exhibitionists who started the trouble in Essex County had heard the Goodwin case talked about, and that the Reverend Samuel Parris, whose bungling handling of the case contributed greatly to its spread, supposed that he was playing the rôle of exorcist that had been successfully assumed in Boston by Cotton Mather, Willard, Moody, and Morton. In the Salem frenzy, Morton seems to have played a quiescent or discreet part. If he attempted to restrain the intemperate zeal of his old friend Stoughton, the presiding justice, it is not on record; but he did share in Increase Mather’s successful, if somewhat belated, effort to apply the brakes. On August 1, 1692, after six women had been hanged as witches, the Cambridge Ministerial Association debated the question of “spectral evidence,” largely upon which the unfortunate women were condemned; and voted against its use except as corroborative evidence. In their belief the Devil could so possess one of his victims as to accuse a totally innocent person of tormenting the victim.68 A little quick action to impress that doctrine on the Salem court would have saved much innocent blood; but the pack was now howling after victims, and even ministers had to watch their steps very carefully in order not to find themselves on the path that led up Gallows Hill.

As a result of the ministerial meeting of August 1, Increase Mather wrote Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, which was read and endorsed by the Ministerial Association on October 3,69 promptly laid before Governor Phips, and printed before the end of the year. This tract had a strong, if not a decisive, influence in inducing Governor Phips to put a stop to the proceedings. The special court met again in January, 1693, but without the use of spectral evidence all the prosecutions failed, and the frenzy subsided.70

One would suppose that after the witchcraft fever had run its course, the more enlightened men in the community would have let the supernatural alone, at least for a time. On the contrary, the Cambridge Ministers’ Association, in the winter of 1693–1694, issued a new set of “Proposals for the Recording of Illustrious Providences.”71 Although this seems to have been a particular pet of the Mathers, Morton, Leverett, and Brattle signed it, and the “Proposals” went out to the ministers of New England as from the Harvard Corporation.

Ten years before, Increase Mather had expressed the hope that a natural history of New England might be written “according to the rules and method” described by Robert Boyle.72 The Royal Society was keen to get weather reports, bills of mortality, and data on fauna and flora from New England. Yet these “Proposals” of 1694 are little more than an invitation to gather ghost stories and accounts of violent intervention of Divine Providence in the universe. It is to the credit of the ministers of New England that very few paid any attention to this ancestor of the questionnaires that clog our mail nowadays.

Charles Morton was named vice-president of Harvard College in the draft charter passed by the General Court on June 4, 1697.73 He was present at the first meeting of the new Harvard Corporation on July 13; but was unable to attend again. Judge Sewall had already noted Morton’s shortness of breath at the funeral of Thomas Graves, on June 1—he sat, panting, on a tomb in the old Charlestown burying place, and “said, for ought he knew, he should be next.”74 The following January he took to his bed and never left it alive. The mildly macabre details of his death on April 11, 1698, are recorded by Sewall in his diary, where they may be read by the curious.75 The funeral on April 14 was attended by Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton and about twelve councillors; scholars of Harvard College preceded the hearse to the burying-ground, and the pall-bearers were President Mather and five other ministers.

Simon Bradstreet, Morton’s successor in the Charlestown pulpit, composed a Latin inscription and epitaph76 for him, which was preserved in writing as a good specimen of New England Latin epigraphy long after the tombstone had disappeared. His will left £50 to Harvard College and the rest of his estate in Charlestown and in Cornwall to his nephews Charles and John and his niece Mary Morton.77

SACRÆ & SEMPITERNÆ MEMORIÆ

REVERENDI PLURIMÙM ET CLARISSIMI VIRI

Dom. CAROLI MORTONI,

ECCLESIÆ CHARLESTONIENSIS PASTORIS INSTRUCTISSIMI:

NEC NON COLLEGII HARVARDINI VICE PRÆSID. PRIMI ÆQUE AC

INSIGNITER IN OMNI

LITERARUM GENERE VERSATIL,

VIRI DENIQUE; TUM IN ANGLIA, (UBI NATUS FUIT ET MAXIMÈ

FLORUIT) TUM IN NOV-ANGLIA

(UBI SENILIS OBIIT) PERMULTIS NOMINIBUS CELEBRANDI.

QUI VITA HAC ÆRUMNOSÂ PROBÈ DEFUNCTUS, APRIL DIE XI.

ANNO D. MDCXCVIII

ÆTATIS SUÆ LXXII

EX PARTE SUI IMMORTALI AC NOBILISSIMÂ IN CÆLIS TRIUMPHAT: EX ALTERA VERÒ, CORRUPTIBILI SCILICET, IN HOC MONUMENTO PAULISPER QUIESCIT; EXPECTANS DUM VOCEM AUDIERIT FILII DEI, QUA REVOCATUS A MORTE IN VITAM VERÈ VITALEM QUAM GLORIOSUS IN ETERNUM REGNABIT.

EPITAPHIUM

INCLYTA MORTONUS MUSARUM GLORIA QUONDAM

ET SACER ETERNI REGIS LEGATUS JESU

POST VARIOS CASUS, POST FUNERA MULTA SUORUM

SIC CADIT IN CINERES RESOLUTUS AB HOSTE SUPREMO,

UT DOMINI VIRTUTE SUI VICTRICE RESURGENS

GAUDEAT ÆTERNIS, ABSORPTA MORTE, TRIUMPHIS.

1. There are notices of Morton in the Dictionary of National Biography, the Dictionary of American Biography, and Arnold G. Matthews, Calamy Revised. The earliest biography is in Edmund Calamy’s “Account of Ministers Ejected” in his Abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s History of his Life and Times (London, 1702; 2d ed., 1713). This is supplemented by Calamy’s Continuation of the Account of the Ministers Ejected (London, 1727), and by Matthews’ Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934). No corpus of Morton letters has survived; but his MS. notebook, with records of ministers’ meetings in Cornwall and New England, and a few letters are in the Massachusetts Historical Society. I have profited greatly by a MS. dissertation on Morton by Mr. Wilbur J. Bender, who wrote the notice in the Dictionary of American Biography.

2. John and John A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, iii. 218. Walter Wilson, the biographer of Defoe, has the best account of the Morton family (Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe, 1830 ed., i. 24 n). He says that the family originated in Nottinghamshire, and was the same as that of Cardinal Morton and Thomas Morton, Bishop of Durham. It appears to have had no connection with the Morton family of Yorkshire, who came early to Plymouth Colony.

3. The aged Lawrence Chaderton was master of Emmanuel in his time, and Thomas Hooker a fellow. Among Morton’s contemporaries as undergraduates were William Blackstone and Isaac Johnson, the founders of Boston, and Nathaniel Rogers and Samuel Whiting, the future ministers of Rowley and Lynn respectively; as well as Bastwick, the Puritan pamphleteer, and Samuel Clarke the martyrologist.

4. George C. Boase, Collectanea Cornubiensia, p. 1402.

5. The date of the marriage given by Venn, following Sir John MacLean, Parochial and Family History of the Deanery of Trigg Minor (i. 461), is May 11, 1616. It seems probable that the right date is 1626, and that the Mortons’ first child was born nine months, not ten years and nine months, after their marriage. Nor is it likely that Morton would have resigned his fellowship at Emmanuel, immediately after taking his first degree, in order to marry.

6. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, iii. 217; Dictionary of National Biography, xxxix. 149.

7. For a succinct Harvard pedigree, see my Founding of Harvard College, p. 104.

8. “I appoint my loveing frend Mr Moreton our minister of St Saviours aforesaid for one [of the overseers], and to him in token of my love I give three pounds and my paire of silver hafted knyves” (will of John Harvard’s mother, 1635, in Henry F. Waters, Genealogical Gleanings in England, I. 125). “I give and bequeath unto Mr Nichollas Morton Minister and Preacher in the parishe of Saint Saviors in Southwarke the some of Forty shillinges in recompence of a Sermon which I desire he should preach at my funerall, for the better Comforte edifyinge and instruccion of such my freinds and neighboures and other people as there shalbe assembled” (will of John’s brother Thomas, 1636, id., p. 128).

9. John became rector of Auton-Gifford, Devon, and Nicholas followed his oldest brother to Wadham College, Oxford, and into the ministry.

10. His will, dated 1640, is in Waters, Genealogical Gleanings, ii. 782–783.

11. Nicholas Morton in his will appoints his “living father in law Mr. Thomas Kestle of Plenderie” his executor; but MacLean (Deanery of Trigg Minor, i. 461) has Thomas Kestell buried in 1626, and succeeded as lord of the manor of Pendavy by his son John Kestell, Charles Morton’s uncle.

12. So Morton wrote to Increase Mather in 1685. Richard Frothingham, History of Charles-town, p. 195.

13. Sir Charles E. Mallet, History of the University of Oxford, ii. 382–390; Montagu Burrows, Register of the Visitors of the University of Oxford (Camden Society), Introduction, passim.

14. Frothingham, Charlestown, p. 195. Samuel Mather, elder brother of Increase, did not obtain an Oxford degree, as Cotton Mather relates; but the records of Magdalen College show that he was a chaplain there, c 1650–1653.

15. Quoted by Mallet, History of Oxford, II. 383.

16. Burrows, Register, p. 569.

17. Robert B. Gardiner, Registers of Wadham College, Part I, p. 180.

18. Id. His age is wrongly given in the records as nineteen.

19. MS. in British Museum by John Wallis. It is quoted in F. A. Dixey, The Early Connexion of the Royal Society with Wadham College and the University of Oxford, a pamphlet from which I have obtained most of the following data about this scientific group. Cf. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667); Irvine Masson, “The Genesis of the Royal Society,” Nature, cxiii. 197–198; Dorothy Stimson, “Dr. Wilkins and the Royal Society,” Journal of Modern History, iii. 539–563. Dean Stimson, in a paper on “Puritanism and the New Science” read before the History of Science Society in 1934, showed that almost all members of this group were of Puritan training or antecedents. That made it easy for them to obtain professorial chairs and other appointments in the reformed Oxford.

20. Joseph Wells, Wadham College, p. 75.

21. Andrew Clark, Life and Times of Anthony Wood, i. 265.

22. 4 Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, viii. 541–542.

23. Printed, with notes by George Lyman Kittredge, in our Publications, xiv. 142–186.

24. Volume x (1676), pp. 293–296.

25. Nonconformist’s Memorial, i. 347; see also Matthews, Calamy Revised, pp. 356–357.

26. Calamy also states that Morton was converted to Puritanism at Oxford. It is unlikely that he would have come to Oxford in 1648, or taken up residence in a Hall already noted for Puritanism, if he had not already come around to that point of view. His father, describing himself in his will as “minister of God’s Word” rather than “rector,” showed himself at least a moderate Puritan; but his Cornish grandparents may well have been Church-and-King men.

27. Wells, Wadham College, pp. 78–79.

28. John Evelyn, Diary (Bohn ed., 1889), i. 305–308.

29. Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 356, quoting Lambeth Palace Library MSS.

30. Complete Parochial History of Cornwall, i. 67; MacLean, Deanery of Trigg Minor, i. 53.

31. Calamy, Nonconformist’s Memorial, i. 348.

32. Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 356.

33. Herbert McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts, p. 76. This is the best work on the dissenting academies. See also Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England, pp. 45–63. There were two academies at Newington Green. The first was kept by Theophilus Gale, ejected fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, later a benefactor of the Harvard College Library.

34. Luke Tyerman, Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, p. 74.

35. A Letter from a Country Divine to His Friend in London, Concerning the Education of the Dissenters, in their Private Academies (London, 1703), pp. 7–8.

36. A Defence of a Letter concerning the Education of Dissenters in their Private Academies (1704), pp. 44, 51. Other references to Morton and his academy will be found in the same tract, pp. 4, 14, 27, 43, 44, 48 (pupils going to hear Bunyan preach, and Morton commending him), 53.

37. Continuation, i. 211 where a list of Morton’s published pamphlets and manuscript treatises is given. Calamy reprints Morton’s MS. “Advice to Candidates for the Ministry” on pp. 198–210. It is full of wit and common sense: “Let your Discourses be mostly Practical, both as to the Subjects, and Manner of Handling. ’Tis but a Crack, for young Divines to be much medling with Controversies. Wrangling Divinity will but put your Spirits out of the comely Christian Frame….”

38. Defoe, “More Short Ways with the Dissenters” (1704), as reprinted in his Collection of Writings (1703–1705), ii. 276. Samuel Palmer, Vindication of the Learning of the Dissenters (1705), pp. 53–54, and Joshua Toulmin, Historical View of the State of the Protestant Dissenters (1814), p. 233, say that the system of Politics called Eutaxia, modelled on More’s Utopia, was “equal, if not superior, to any printed composition of that kind.” No copy of it is now known to exist.

39. Tyerman, Life of Samuel Wesley, pp. 71–72.

40. Toulmin, Historical View of the Dissenters, p. 234.

41. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts, pp. 2, 76; text in Calamy, Continuation, i. 177. This was not one of the Test Oaths. It had been instituted in the fourteenth century to force the seceding scholars at Stamford to return to England. Dean Peacock, in his Observations on the Statutes of the University of Cambridge (1841), remarked that it had been consistently violated from the time of its imposition to his own day.

42. Samuel Wesley, Defence of a Letter, p. 53; Tyerman, Life of Samuel Wesley, p. 67.

43. Printed in Calamy, Continuation, i. 177–197.

44. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts, p. 65. Other academies were founded by Presbyterian, Congregational, and Baptist societies in the following century. The most famous of these was Warrington Academy, “The Athens of the North,” where Priestley taught. See John F. Fulton, “The Warrington Academy and its Influence upon Medicine and Science,” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine (Johns Hopkins University), I. 50–80.

45. Prince MSS., Mass. Hist. Soc.; printed in Frothingham, Charlestown, p. 195.

46. Edward Randolph, in a letter dated July 28, to the Lords of Trade (Hutchinson Papers, Prince Society, ii. 287), and in another, dated August 2, to Archbishop Sancroft (N. E. Hist. Gen. Register, xxxvii. 271), says that Morton arrived “about 2 months agoe.” Samuel Sewall first mentions Morton when Morton was giving the weekly lecture in Cambridge meeting on July 21 (Diary, 1. 144–145).

47. John Dunton, Letters from New England (Prince Society), p. 296. Both here and in his Life and Errors (1818 ed., i. 123), Dunton makes an elaborate and complimentary characterization of Morton. Dunton certainly knew Morton, who asked Increase Mather to be kind to the young bookseller, and who had taught Dunton’s uncle, the Reverend Obadiah Marriott. But Dunton’s characterizations are so frequently lifted from other books, as Chester N. Greenough has shown (our Publications, xiv. 212–257; xxi. 232–251), that I have not seen fit to quote him further.

48. Henry Horsey to his brother in New England, Prince MSS., Mass. Hist. Soc.; printed in William I. Budington, History of the First Church, Charlestown, p. 221; extract from Penhallow’s autobiography in 2 Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., i. 161.

49. Hutchinson Papers, ii. 287, 293.

50. Sewall, Diary, i. 155. The issue was that Morton had already been ordained in England and so refused to be ordained again, insisting on being merely “installed.” He set a precedent since followed in New England Congregational churches.

51. Budington, First Church, Charlestown, pp. 103, 106–113.

52. Sewall, Diary, i. 446–447.

53. Sewall, Diary, i. 349.

54. John G. Palfrey, History of New England (1890 ed.), iii. 549; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, Am. and W. I., 1689–1692, p. 165.

55. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, Am. and W. I., 1685–1688, pp. 470–471.

56. Frothingham, Charlestown, pp. 221–223.

57. Horsey’s letter in Budington, First Church, Charlestown, p. 221.

58. So says John Dunton, 2 Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., I. 115–116.

59. 2 Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., i. 162; 4 Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., viii. 111–112.

60. Our Publications, xv. cxlix, xliii n, cl.

61. Id.; p 345.

62. The record book, which after Morton’s death belonged to the Rogers family of Ipswich, is now in the Massachusetts Historical Society. It is printed in I Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., xvii. 254–280. Cotton Mather printed some of the conclusions arrived at by the Association as Thirty Important Cases (Boston, 1699), and reprinted it as Book V of the Magnolia Christi Americana (1702).

63. George L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, p. 336.

64. Id., p. 335

65. See Edward Wyllys Taylor, “Some Medical Aspects of Witchcraft,” in Problems of Personality (the nearest to a rational explanation of the frenzy that we have), and Charles W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft, 11. 112.

66. Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., VIII. 368; Magnolia (1853 ed.), 11. 457, 463, 465.

67. George L. Burr, Editor, Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, p. 97.

68. I Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., XVII. 268.

69. Id.

70. See Thomas J. Holmes’s able and detailed discussion of Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience and its influence in his Increase Mather, A Bibliography of His Works, I. 117–138.

71. 1 Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, xvii. 271; Magnolia, Book v.

72. Preface to Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (Boston, 1684).

73. Our Publications, xv. xlvii, cl.

74. Diary, I. 468.

75. Id., I. 471.

76. I Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, viii. 76.

77. Thomas B. Wyman, Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown, pp. 687–688. Mrs. Morton, of whom nothing seems to have been known except her first name, Joan, had died in 1693, and his nephew Nicholas died soon after graduating from Harvard. No children are mentioned in the will.

78. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 236–251.

79. Josiah Quincy, History of Harvard University, II. 482–483.

80. Annals of the American Pulpit, I. 218.

81. “1 Harvard Text-Books and Reference Books of the Seventeenth Century,” our Publications, xxviii. 361–438.

82. In collecting this information I have been aided by the courtesy of the officials of all the libraries mentioned, together with those of the Henry E. Huntington Library. I particularly wish to acknowledge the kindnesses of Mr. Stewart Mitchell of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Mr. Robert W. G. Vail of the American Antiquarian Society, and Mr. Gerald G. Wilder, Librarian of Bowdoin College. Photostats of the Bodleian MS. have been made available through the co-operation of Bodley’s Librarian and the Harvard College Library; photostats of the Greenleaf, Eells, and Webb MSS. have been purchased for the General Library of the University of Michigan through a grant from the faculty research fund.

83. The MS. carries the inscription “Ex Libris Β Beale” and the date 1683 in handwriting somewhat like that of the transcription. For the Beales, see Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (1849 ed.), ii. 537–545. There is little certainty, however, about this identification.

84. William D. Ross, Aristotle; William D. Ross, Editor, The Works of Aristotle, translated into English. The Scholastic use of Aristotle’s scientific works is to be observed in numerous commentaries. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, wrote commentaries on every book here mentioned except the Historia Animalium.

85. Sterling P. Lamprecht, “The Role of Descartes in Seventeenth-Century England,” Studies in the History of Ideas (edited by the Department of Philosophy of Columbia University), III. 180–240.

86. Cf. (except for the De Homine) Elizabeth S. Haldane and George R. T. Ross, Editors, The Philosophical Works of Descartes (translated into English). Part IV of the Principia Philosophiae, most important for comparison with Morton, is barely outlined; for it and for the De Homine it is necessary to consult the originals.

87. Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 233–234. Other such text-books, to which Morton’s is vastly superior, include Daniel Widdowes, Natural Philosophy (2d ed., 1631), John Johnstone, An History of the Wonderful Things of Nature; Set Forth in Ten Severall Classes (1657), and Thirteen Books of Natural Philosophy by D. Sennert, translated by Nicholas Culpeper and others (1661).

88. Richard Blome, Entire Body of Philosophy, p. 106.

89. Cf., below, Chapters 2, 6–8, 12, 15, 17–20, 23.

90. See Morison, Founding of Harvard College, pp. 250–251. There are two eighteenth-century editions of Boyle’s works, one in five volumes in 1744, the other in six volumes in 1772. An indispensable guide is John F. Fulton, “A Bibliography of The Honourable Robert Boyle,” Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers, iii. 1–172, 339–365.

91. Certain Physiological Essays (London, 1661); in Works (1772 ed.), i. 300.

92. The Massachusetts Historical Society owns two transcriptions of Morton’s “Treatise of Logick,” another of his manuscript text-books which was used for a time at Harvard. One was made by Timothy Lindall (H. C. 1695); the other, by Daniel Greenleaf, as extracted by Jabez Fitch, is in the same notebook as his copy of the Compendium. The nature of Morton’s logic appears from later references; see especially below, p. 10, note 2.

93. This and the following chapter are based ultimately upon Aristotle’s Physica. The divisions, however, are typically Scholastic, and one can see the same method and terminology in other text-books. Compare, for example, Antoine Legrand’s Institutio Philosophic (London, 1672), Pt. iv, ch. i. In Richard Blome’s translation is the information that: “Natural Philosophy … or Physiology, is the Science of Natural Bodies, and their Various Affections…. And those are called Natural Things, or Bodies, which are endued with Nature, or that are compounded of Matter and Form…. Natural Things are considered two manner of ways in Physiology, either Generally or Specially.” Entire Body of Philosophy, p. 93.

94. The specific references to Aristotle in this chapter are to distinctions made in the Categoriae, the Physica, and De Generatione et Corruptione. Morton, following Scholastic precedent, is more systematic than Aristotle will be found to be.

95. See John, xi, and Mark, x: 46–52.

96. Morton assumes that his readers, with the background of his text-book on logic, are familiar with the basis of all Scholastic dialectic—Aristotle’s ten predicaments: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection. These are named in the Categoriae, ch. iv, and again in the Topica, Bk. 1, ch. ix.

97. Robert Boyle, in The Origine of Formes and Qualities (Oxford, 1666), summarizes much of the anti-Aristotelian thinking on the concepts of form, matter, motion, etc. This book Morton knew well. Compare, however, Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, Pt. 11.

98. Morton’s discussion of matter appears to depend in part upon Boyle’s Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection (London, 1675). The simile of the soft wax which may be molded into any desired form is developed there in terms very like those used by Morton.

99. This, as Mr. Morison has shown, was a principle of ancient natural philosophy which Morton was especially loath to give up. See Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, p. 241.

100. Morton’s distinctions here should be compared with those in the Physica. His six species of motion are exactly correspondent to those in the Categoriae, ch. xiv.

101. William Petty, in his Discourse Concerning the Use of Duplicate Proportion (London, 1674), attempted to re-define such concepts as place, time, and motion. See a convenient review of the work in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 108 (November 23, 1674). Morton seems to be indebted to Petty not only for materials in this chapter, but also for portions of Chapters 2 and 6.

102. The chief of the “Corpuscularian Phylosophers” was Pierre Gassendi, but Descartes and Boyle were sometimes, and with reason, counted among the corpuscularians or atomists. See under corpuscle and related words in the New English Dictionary, and, for a brief discussion of the importance of the atomist hypothesis, Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, p. 250.

103. Morton’s references to Descartes suggest either direct knowledge of the Principia Philosophiae or acquaintance with such a text-book as Legrand’s. Legrand covers the same ground in Pt. iv, chs. xi–xxv, with ch. xii, which discusses place, chs. xiv and xv, dealing with local motion, and ch. xxiv, which treats of time, being especially in point.

104. Boyle’s definition of time as “duration measured” is thought by Mr. Morison to have come from either The Excellency of Theology (London, 1674) or The Great Effects of Even Languid and Unheeded Motion (London, 1685). The words also occur in Some Considerations about the Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion (London, 1675), by “T. E., a Layman,” a tract to which Boyle’s Possibilities of the Resurrection was appended. See Boyle, Works (1744 ed.), 111. 525.

105. The organization here suggests Aristotle’s De Caelo and De Mundo, but the information is almost wholly from more modern sources. It is doubtful if Morton knew at first hand all the scientific writers whom he cites: Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Copernicus, Kepler, Gassendi, Tycho Brahe, and John Wilkins. Most of them are mentioned in Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. v, chs. viii–xi, where there may also be seen three diagrams very similar to those in Morton. Such information and diagrams were common in other text-books and popular treatises of the period, although they were originally taken from such books as the De Revolutionibus. See, for a study of the provenience of these materials, Francis R. Johnson and Sanford V. Larkey, “Thomas Digges, the Copernican System, and the Idea of the Infinity of the Universe in 1576,” Huntington Library Bulletin, No. 5, pp. 69–117. Morton diverges sharply from Legrand by omitting all mention of the Cartesian vortices.

106. The “Platonic Year,” really not Platonic at all, was a favorite notion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The references in the New English Dictionary give an interesting brief history.

107. This is an admirable illustration of the bookishness of Morton’s science. He points out that there is an arithmetical progression in the velocity of falling bodies, but he ignores the familiar and useful fact that that velocity is in definite proportion to the distance and the time of the fall (s = ½gt²).

108. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was first printed at Oxford in 1621. It is comparable at many points with Morton’s notions on physiology and related subjects, and even on astronomy, as is suggested in some of the notes below.

109. John Beale (1603–1683?) was elected to the Royal Society in 1662–63, at a time when that body was much interested in making a history of the weather. On September 2, 1663, for instance, John Wilkins suggested that from constant observations it might be possible to prognosticate changes, and Sir Kenelm Digby remarked that Dr. John Dee, by such observations for a seven-year period, “acquired such a prognosticating skill of weather, that he was, on that account, accounted a witch.” Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1760), 1. 300. A week later Mr. Oldenburg “mentioned, that Mr. Beal was willing to engage in the observation of the weather, and in registering the changes thereof; and that he hoped to set the same at work in other parts of the country.” Id., 1. 302. The foremost investigator in this matter was, however, Robert Hooke, whose “Method for Making a History of the Weather” was printed in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London (pp. 173–179) and, in part, in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 24 (April 8, 1667).

110. Morton may have had in mind Anthony Griffin’s An Astrological Judgment touching Theft (London, 1665).

111. John Gadbury (1627–1704) was a notorious and immensely popular astrologer, one of the most colorful charlatans of Morton’s time.

112. See Esther, iii: 7.

113. Thomas Gataker (1577?–1654), a Puritan divine, became involved in a controversy about astrology when he published for the Westminster Assembly his annotations on Jeremiah x: 2: “Learn not the way of the heathen and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven, for the heathen are dismayed at them.” In his Vindication of the Annotations (London, 1653), Gataker defended himself against the famous William Lillie; in A Discours Apologetical (London, 1654), he leveled a postscript at Gadbury.

114. Sir Christopher Heydon (d 1623) was the author of a learned Defence of Judicial Astrologie (London, 1603). Why Morton cites him in the same breath with Thomas Gataker is not clear.

115. Morton’s information on stars and planets probably comes from some text-book. Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. v, ch. xxiii, agrees with Morton that there are 48 constellations, 6 degrees of magnitude, and 1022 most visible stars. But Morton’s table of periodical motions differs radically from the figures given by Legrand, as does his estimate of the circumference of the earth.

116. This allusion appears to be to the Mercator projection, but it may be to some other of the many new projections which were used by experimentally minded map-makers in the seventeenth century. See Arthur R. Hinks, Map Projections (2d ed., Cambridge, 1921), p. 148.

117. Legrand (“History of Nature,” p. 81) gives Willebrod Snell’s figure of 24,600 miles. Boyle, in The Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (London, 1663), says that the common account makes the circuit of the globe to be 22,600 Italian miles, which the “more accurate” Gassendus has amended to 26,255 of the same measure. See Boyle, Works (1772 ed.), 11. 20. Burton, in his long “Digression of Air” in the Anatomy of Melancholy, gives 21,500 miles as the circumference; 7,000 miles as the diameter.

118. The discussion of the light of the moon is paralleled in Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. v, ch. xx, where it is attributed to Galileo. There is some possibility that Morton knew Galileo’s writings, either directly or through the English translations in Thomas Salusbury’s Mathematical Collections (London, 1661).

119. The description of the elements goes back to Aristotle’s De Generatione et Corruptione and Meteorologica, while gravity and levity are treated in the De Caelo. The same matters are considered by Descartes in Principia Philosophiae, Pt. iv. This chapter is most closely related, however, to Boyle’s famous book, The Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661), where Morton may well have found his information on the chemical theories of Descartes, the “Chymists,” and “Gassendus and other Atomists.” A number of points seem to suggest some knowledge of Boyle’s “History of Fluidity,” in Certain Physiological Essays (London, 1661). There, for instance, are to be found a discussion of the nature of fluids and the experiment, which Morton mentions on another occasion, of the two flat polished marbles.

120. The word electrical is here used in an obsolete sense; as Mr. Morison has noted, Morton in Chapter 10 uses elatery instead of electricity. See under these words in the New English Dictionary.

121. In this chapter again the chief influences are Aristotle and Boyle, with the De Generatione et Corruptione and Meteorologica on the one hand, The Sceptical Chymist on the other.

122. This allusion suggests some knowledge of Boyle’s experiments with combustion, described in The Relation betwixt Flame and the Air (London, 1672).

123. Compare pp. 155–157, below.

124. As Mr. Morison has noted, Morton here reveals his familiarity with the work of Harvey, Malpighi, and Leeuwenhoek.

125. Although there are hints of the De Generatione et Corruptione in Morton’s treatment of the air, he is more largely indebted to Boyle’s The Spring and Weight of the Air (Oxford, 1660). There one may find some discussion of the height of the atmosphere, the use of the word restitutive to describe elasticity, and the analogy of wool; consideration of air-pump experiments and of what happens in rarefaction (not accepted by Morton, who will not give up “nature abhors a vacuum”); some treatment of the weight of the air; and a description of Pascal’s investigation of the effects of altitude on barometric pressure. Indeed, this whole chapter is saturated with Boyle’s ideas, even though Morton retains the ancient division of the air into three regions, of which the upper and lower were thought to be hotter than the middle. Boyle had refuted this Aristotelian concept in “An Examen of Antiperistasis,” a portion of The Experimental History of Cold (London, 1665).

126. Here Morton’s memory seems to have been in error; at least the editor has not discovered the relation referred to in the Philosophical Transactions. From the first, however, the Royal Society was much interested in the famous peak of Teneriffe, proposing experiments to be tried there, collecting accounts of it, and inquiring what time of year was best for climbing it. See Birch, History of the Royal Society, 1. 8–10, 18, 397. One account was printed in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, and another in Robert Hooke’s Lectiones Cutlerianae (London, 1679), the latter being a book used by Morton for certain points in Chapters 13 and 21. In both cases, however, the details are in some respects different from those given by Morton.

127. Morton’s reference is to Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy (London, 1664), a book which he refers to again in Chapter 31. To Power (1623–1668), Morton probably owed more than appears from these references; see, for a description of the book, Thomas Cowles, “Dr. Henry Power, Disciple of Sir Thomas Browne,” Isis, xx. 344–366.

128. Morton’s remarks on water form the most interesting and most “modern” section of his book. His superiority to Legrand, for instance, is marked, and his very considerable power of combining his theory with practicalities, especially evident.

129. Morton’s hydrodynamics reflect vaguely the investigations of Torricelli. See A. Wolf, A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pp. 222–223.

130. The diagram of the Archimedean screw for raising water probably comes from a famous description of the water-works at Augsburg in Germany, printed originally in Girolamo Cardan, De Subtilitate (Nuremberg, 1550). See Wolf, History of Science, pp. 524–534, where is also described and illustrated the water engine at London Bridge, mentioned by Morton just above.

131. Speculation on why the sea is salt is of course an ancient pastime, and may be observed as far back as the Meteorologica. But Morton’s comments appear to be related to contemporary discussion. He could have obtained his information from a review of some of Boyle’s tracts which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 97 (October 6, 1673). Some phrases, however, suggest that he knew a letter by Martin Lister which appeared in the same periodical, No. 156 (Feb. 20, 1683/4), in which case the Compendium must have been added to later than 1680. Or Morton may have known Boyle’s Tracts Consisting of Observations about the Saltness of the Sea (London, 1674).

132. A description of the salt springs and of salt-making at Nantwich in Cheshire appeared in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 53 (November 15, 1669).

133. The discussion of tides makes perhaps the most extended use of a single source which Morton allowed himself. Although he says that “these times are taken out of Galleleus,” it is clear, as Mr. Morison has said, that Morton has carefully studied John Wallis’s essay “exhibiting his Hypothesis about the Flux and Reflux of the Sea,” which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 16 (August 6, 1666). There Wallis summarized Galileo’s theories, agreed with them in general, and then suggested a theory to account for phenomena left unexplained by his predecessor. Nearly one third of this chapter will be found to derive from Wallis’s essay, whence come also the figure on p. 65 and the first figure on p. 67. Furthermore, as the text indicates, Morton made a synopsis of Wallis’s article, with further diagrams, which was inserted as an appendix to the Compendium. It is to be found at the end of the Rogers MS., but it was evidently an integral part of the original, since it is mentioned twice in all the American transcriptions. Morton’s skill as a teacher is well exemplified in his use of Wallis; he condenses, simplifies, and everywhere makes the material more concrete by the use of homely illustration.

134. Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella was the most celebrated writer on agriculture of the ancient world. A Roman, he composed, some time in the first century A.D., his De Re Rustica in twelve books. Morton’s reference is probably to this work, but to what part of it the editor has not discovered. The De Re Rustica, first published at Venice in 1472, is known in many later editions.

135. One such proposal, which attracted wide attention, and in which Robert Boyle was interested, was that of Captain Robert Fitzgerald. He described his process with extreme caution—lest he reveal its secrets—in Salt Water Sweetned (London, 1683), a book which was in its tenth edition by 1685. However, a method of distillation of sea water was described in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 67 (January 16, 1670/1), fifteen years earlier.

136. The ancients’ definition of earth comes from the De Generatione et Corruptione. The remainder of Morton’s discussion is largely Cartesian, and should be compared with the Principia Philosophiae, Pt. iv. There are hints of the same ideas, too, in Boyle’s writings, especially the Essays of Effluviums (London, 1673) and An Essay of the Great Effects of Even Languid and Unheeded Motion (London, 1685). Legrand (Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. vi, ch. x) covers the problems of magnetic and electrical attraction in very similar terms.

137. There is little evidence that Morton knew at first hand the work of William Gilbert of Colchester (1540–1603), whose De Magnete was published at London in 1600. This reference shows, however, that Morton was familiar with some of Gilbert’s ideas, acquired, perhaps, through some secondary source.

138. Most of the definitions and divisions in this section are based ultimately upon Aristotle, both the De Generatione et Corruptione and the Meteorologica contributing something. The discussion of temperament, essentially medieval in outlook, leads to the ancient medical works in the Hippocratic Collection as well as to Galen, and touches one of the most tangled problems in medical history.

139. Livinus Lemnius (1505–1568) was author of De Habitu et Constitutione Corporis (Antwerp, 1561). As Mr. Morison notes, a later edition of this book was in the library of John Harvard.

140. Both the Meteorologica and the De Mundo underlie Morton’s comment on fiery meteors. Aristotle’s notions have been modified markedly, however, by the seventeenth-century enthusiasm for nitre as an explanation for all kinds of atmospheric phenomena. This may be observed in Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, Pt. iv, in Boyle’s Essays of Effluviums, and in a long-forgotten book by William Clark, The Natural History of Nitre (London, 1670), where Morton’s explanation of thunder and lightning is paralleled rather closely. See also under nitre and kindred words in the New English Dictionary.

141. Mr. Morison has indicated the background of Morton’s error here; see also under nostoc in the New English Dictionary. Star-shoot was one of the early subjects of investigation by the Royal Society. See a letter from Henry Oldenburg to Boyle, November 10, 1664, in Boyle’s Works (1772 ed.), vi. 174.

142. Morton’s explanations of comets show a rather curious use of sources. A great deal of his information comes from two books, neither of which can really be regarded as an impressive authority. Robert Hooke’s Cometa, a part of Lectures and Collections (London, 1678), consists of rather disorganized remarks, from which Morton apparently culled much, including, perhaps, the figure on page 90. Hooke’s book was included in his Lectiones Cutlerianae (London, 1679), which has recently been reprinted by R. T. Gunther in Early Science in Oxford, viii These are the Gresham College lectures to which Morton refers. The second source, John Spencer’s A Discourse Concerning Prodigies (Cambridge, 1663), has about three pages out of one hundred on Morton’s point, but more comes from those three pages than is suggested by the citations. See, for example, the note on page 92, below.

143. See the first number of that journal, March 6, 1664/5.

144. Cf. Spencer, A Discourse Concerning Prodigies (p. 15): “… Tycho measur’d in the tayle or train of the Comet, An. 1577 ninety six semidiamiters of the earth; and some astronomers found in the beard of that which shone An. 1618. the extent of 382,700 German miles.”

145. The information on winds follows Aristotle’s Meteorologica and De Mundo, and Morton does not accept Descartes’ variant explanation of earthquakes. Boxing the compass was a familiar text-book exercise; see, for example, the popular manual by Joseph Moxon, A Tutor to Astronomie and Geographic, first published in London in 1659. The explanation of trade winds and monsoons, a matter which interested Francis Bacon among others, is strikingly paralleled in a letter by Dr. George Garden which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 175 (September, 1685).

146. Here again the Meteorologica and the De Mundo are basic, even though Morton makes much of nitre and nitrosulphurious particles, as in Chapter 12. Mr. Morison has noted that the discussion of ice owes much to Boyle’s Experimental History of Cold.

147. The “circumforaneous water drinker” is mentioned by Boyle in his Experimental History of Colours (London, 1663; Works, 1772 ed., 1. 772). Boyle says that the tricks of “those mountebanks that are commonly called water-drinkers” had been exposed “in a little pamphlet printed divers years ago in English.” The editor has been unable to identify this pamphlet, but Morton obviously got his rather full information from some other source than Boyle. The trick is described, with somewhat differing details, in Sports and Pastimes: or, Sport for the City, and Pastime for the Country; with a Touch of Hocus Pocus, or Legerdemain. Fitted for the Delight and Recreation of Youth by J. M. Amat. Ant. (London, 1676).

148. Mr. Morison has shown that this is the latest event mentioned in the Compendium, and the best evidence for the conclusion that Morton composed his book about 1680. As has been suggested, however, certain allusions hint at additions or revisions as late, perhaps, as 1685.

149. Although haloes, parhelia, and paraselenae, as well as rainbows, are treated in the Meteorologica, they were particularly interesting to the seventeenth century. Boyle touches upon them in the Experimental History of Colours, which Morton cites; Descartes’ considerable investigation of this branch of optics is echoed in Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. vi, ch. xx, where may be found diagrams quite similar to the figures on the next page. Discussions of the same phenomena, somewhat unlike Morton’s, may be found in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 13 (June 4, 1666), and No. 60 (June 20, 1670).

150. Legrand’s treatment of stone (Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. vi, ch. ix) suggests that he and Morton drew upon similar Scholastic sources, but there are traces in this chapter of both Descartes and Boyle.

151. See Historia Naturalis, Bk. xxxvii, ch. lx. It is rather surprising that this is Morton’s only mention of Pliny the Elder, whose famous book is comparable at many points with the Compendium.

152. Boyle’s The Origin and Virtue of Gems (London, 1672), is again referred to in Chapter 20.

153. Morton may allude to Petty’s A Dialogue of Diamonds rather than to the Discourse of Duplicate Proportion. See The Petty Papers, edited by the Marquis of Lansdowne (London, 1927), 11. 263.

154. This information is of special interest because Morton’s only contribution to the Philosophical Transactions (No. 113, April 26, 1675) was “The Improvement of Cornwall by Sea-sand, communicated by an Intelligent Gentleman well acquainted in those parts to Dr. Dan. Cox.”

155. Perhaps because of his Cornish connections, Morton shared to an unusual degree in the widespread interest of his time in mines and mining. Boyle wrote some articles of inquiry touching mines, printed in the Philosophical Transactions (No. 19, November 19, 1666), which seem to be condensed in Morton’s judgment on how to find “where the mine is.” Other interesting parallels in the same journal are to be found in No. 5 (July 3, 1665), where adits and their use are described; No. 69 (March 25, 1671), in which there is a long account, with diagrams, of Cornish tin mines; and No. 137 (February 10, 1677/8), where Dr. Christopher Merret discusses the Godolphin Ball or mine in Cornwall, Cornish diamonds, “mundick,” and other aspects of tin-working.

156. The proverb quoted by Morton may be found in almost any book on Cornwall. See, for instance, Gilbert Davies, The Parochial History of Cornwall, i. 152; S. P. B. Mais, The Cornish Riviera (3d ed., London, 1934), p. 19. Thomas Bushell’s proposal was but one of many projects for Hingston Down, and but one of many schemes by that energetic mining man. Mr. Morison has indicated the recent study by J. W. Gough, The Superlative Prodigall, A Life of Thomas Bushell (London, 1932). But Bushell’s bellows were not new in principle; they and other of the methods noticed by Morton may be studied in Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica (Basel, 1556), a famous book translated, with notes, by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (London, 1912). The Hoovers have many suggestions for a reader of Morton; they describe, for instance, the vast literature on Hannibal’s supposed use of vinegar to split the rocks of the Alps. It is worth noting, too, that bellows were actually used at St. Agnes in Cornwall in 1696, before Morton’s death. See The Victoria History of the County of Cornwall, i. 546.

157. For the value of gold and its place in English coinage, see A. E. Feaveryear, The Found Sterling, pp.71–90.

158. Morton here repeats a popular, and probably erroneous, story about the death of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1612. See the articles in the Dictionary of National Biography on Henry, William Butler (1535–1618), the royal physician, and Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne (1573–1655). There is also a pamphlet by Sir Norman Moore, On the Illness and Death of Henry Prince of Wales, which demonstrates that the prince died of typhoid fever.

159. This story probably refers to Sir Francis Godolphin, who some time in the sixteenth century imported a Dutch mining expert to show him how to improve mining methods in the famous Godolphin Ball. See The Victoria History of the County of Cornwall, 1. 548.

160. Morton means here the American Indians. The first instance of “American” meaning a “native or citizen of the United States, or the earlier British colonies included in these” is, according to the Dictionary of American English, in the introduction to Cotton Mather’s Magnolia (1702).

161. From this point on through Chapter 30, Aristotle’s De Anima shapes the general outline of the discussion. Evidently, however, Morton was familiar with the anatomical and physiological notions of his own time, as they were summarized in medical books designed for the general public. Comparison with Legrand and with the “Digression of Anatomy” in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy shows how much Morton’s knowledge of the nutritive process, procreation, and the processes of sensation was common property.

162. Walter Charleton (1619–1707) was author of Natural History of Nutrition (London, 1659).

163. William Cole (1635–1716) published his De Secretione Animali at Oxford in 1674.

164. Jean Fernel (1497–1558) was a prolific medical writer, whose works were long popular throughout Europe. Where he relates this story the editor has not discovered.

165. Morton’s acquaintance with Harvey may have been directly through the De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis, or through some intermediate source. See the note on p. 193, below.

166. Morton’s knowledge of Sanctorius’ De Statica Medicina (Venice, 1614) may easily have been through Boyle’s almost identical mention of insensible perspiration in The Spring and Weight of the Air. See Boyle, Works (1772 ed.), 1. 105; for Sanctorius (1561–1636), see Wolf, History of Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pp. 433–435.

167. The backgrounds of this chapter include Theophrastus’ De Natura et Causis Plantarum and Aristotle’s De Plantis. It is obvious, however, that the science of plant morphology was in its infancy in the seventeenth century, and Morton was none too well informed of the ideas of the Neoterics (i.e., Moderns). Burton, by the way, uses Neoterics in this same sense in the Anatomy of Melancholy.

168. Morton’s comments on procreation owe something to Robert Hooke’s Lampas (London, 1677), and something to William Harvey’s pioneer work in embryology, Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium (London, 1651). From Hooke’s book, a part of the same Gresham College lectures used for the chapter on comets, comes some of the knowledge of microscopical investigations of maiden-hair, male-fern, and other plants, as well as the speculation about the grass that grew after the Great Fire of London. See Gunther, Early Science in Oxford, viii. 198–206. The account of the hen’s egg is, as Mr. Morison has shown, a condensation of Harvey’s book. Note that Morton knows there is discussion regarding the sexuality of plants, a fact not fully established until the eighteenth century, and that he does not believe in spontaneous generation, though he makes no mention of the experiments of Francesco Redi.

169. This chapter, together with portions of Chapters 26, 28, and 30, hinges upon one of the central points in Cartesian discussion: the distinction between man and the animals. See, for a convenient summary, Albert G. A. Balz, “Cartesian Doctrine and the Animal Soul: An Incident in the Formation of the Modern Philosophical Tradition,” Studies in the History of Ideas, 111. 115–177. Although Aristotle’s De Anima has some relation to the ideas here, it would seem likely that Morton had read such contemporary books as Thomas Willis’ De Anima Brutorum (London, 1672) and Antoine Legrand’s Dissertatio de Carentia Sensus et Cognitionis in Brutis (London, 1675). Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. 1, is again a convenient place to observe the background of the ideas presented from this point on through Chapter 30.

170. Despite the influence of the De Anima and the De Sensu et Sensibili, this chapter is dominated by contemporary discussion. Most important, as Mr. Morison has indicated, is Isaac Newton’s letter in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 80 (February 19, 1671/2), a famous theory of vision which was followed by a long series of attacks and defenses in the same journal. Morton’s definition of light follows Newton’s, as does his description of white light (see the Philosophical Transactions, No. 88, November 18, 1672). Many things, moreover, suggest Boyle’s Experimental History of Colours, twice cited by Morton. The description of the anatomy of the eye is paralleled in Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. viii, ch. xvi, where there is a somewhat similar diagram.

171. This brief rejection of the belief in the evil eye has considerable interest because of Morton’s quiescent part in the Salem witchcraft proceedings of 1692. Thomas Brattle wrote that some of the Salem justices undertook to explain the cure of afflicted persons by the touch of their supposed tormentors on the basis of Cartesian philosophy and the doctrine of effluvia: “… and the account they give of it is this; that by this touch, the venemous and malignant particles, that were ejected from the eye, do, by this means, return to the body whence they came, and so leave the afflicted persons pure and whole.” Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, George L. Burr, Editor, p. 171. Neither Brattle nor Morton held this opinion, nor did Increase Mather, who wrote that “the notion of Fascination by the Eye is unphilosophical.” Increase Mather, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (Boston, 1693 [1692]), p. 42.

172. Aristotle’s brief treatise De Audibilibus supplements the De Anima and the De Sensu as the background for Morton’s acoustics. This chapter, too, is closely related, although not perhaps indebted, to Francis Bacon’s extensive experiments and discussions of sound in the Sylva Sylvarum, Centuries ii and iii.

173. The reference is to Boyle’s Spring and Weight of the Air, to which, as Mr. Morison has said, Morton owes much in this chapter.

174. As Mr. Morison has noted, Morton’s whole chapter owes much to Sir Samuel Morland (1625–1695), An Account of the Speaking Trumpet (London, 1672). This study, which was also printed in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 79, includes a discussion of the nature of sound. As Mr. Morison recalls in his foreword, Samuel Wesley was particularly shocked because some of his schoolmates at Morton’s academy shouted insults through a speaking trumpet at the local Anglican clergyman. In 1678, by the way, Increase Mather appears to have been interested in Morland’s speaking trumpet. See Kenneth B. Murdock, Increase Mather, p. 147.

175. This music room was presumably at Mamhead, the Ball mansion near Exeter, but the editor has been unable to discover any other description of it.

176. A long description of the whispering place at Gloucester was read before the Royal Society on November 5, 1662. See Birch, History of the Royal Society, 1. 120–123.

177. Morton’s introduction to music is not very helpful, for he appears to be in error both in his description of concord and in his scale of musical notes. See, for a convenient view of the musical knowledge upon which Morton could draw, Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London, 1597), pp. 2, 70–71, etc. Although Morton mentions the monochord, he appears to be ignorant of the discovery that strings vibrate in segments, communicated by John Wallis in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 134 (April 23, 1677).

178. In this chapter, once more the background is Aristotelian, the De Anima and the De Sensu being in point. But with the older ideas Morton combines some seventeenth-century physiology. For comparison, see Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. viii, chs. xii–xiv, and Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy.

179. With the addition of Aristotle’s De Memoria et Reminiscentia, the comments on the “interior senses” follow much the same sources as were suggested for the preceding chapter. There is a trace, however, of the Cartesian discussion mentioned in connection with Chapter 22.

180. As Morton indicates, the “Popish Schoolmen” were his chief predecessors in discussing the object, seat, acts, and passions of the sensitive appetite. Here are echoes, for instance, of Thomas Aquinas’s “Treatise on Man,” Q. lxxvi–lxxxi, and his “Treatise on Human Acts,” Pt. 11. See The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (22 vols., London, 1911–1925). Descartes covered the same material, under a classification somewhat varying from Morton’s, in Les Passions de l’Âme.

181. Two of Aristotle’s biological treatises, De Incessu Animalium and De Motu Animalium will be found to have some bearing on this section. Morton’s physiology of the nervous system is derived, however, from Descartes’ De Homine, perhaps through some such intermediary as Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. viii, ch. vi. See Charles Singer, A Short History of Medicine, pp. 127–129. The mechanistic implications, here quite evident, were more fully developed by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, whose De Motu Animalium (Rome, 1680–1681) may possibly have been known by Morton. The discussion of the souls of brutes continues the question raised before in Chapters 22 and 26.

182. Morton, perhaps influenced by his teacher, John Wilkins, had more than ordinary interest in the conquest of the air. See Morton’s “Enquiry into the Physical and Literal Sense of that Scripture Jeremiah viii, 7,” in the Harleian Miscellany (2nd ed., London, 1744), 11. 558–567; and cf. Marjorie Nicolson, “A World in the Moon,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, xvii. No. 2. Morton was proposing the hypothesis that swallows and storks and their kind wintered in the moon.

183. In the Ward MS., used by Mr. Morison, this statement is attributed to “Hevel.” In the other American transcriptions it is clearly “Slegelius,” and may perhaps refer to Paulus Marquart Slegel, author of Disputatio de Haemorrhagia (Jena, 1640), listed in the British Museum catalogue. In the Bodleian MS., however, “Spigelius” is inserted as a correction. The reference is probably to De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Venice, 1627) by Adrian van den Spieghel (1578–1625), a Flemish anatomist.

184. In his remarks on the pulse Morton deals with what has been called “the crucial point in Harvey’s argument,” and “a most important question ever since.” See William Harvey, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Tercentennial Edition, with an English translation and annotations by Chauncy D. Leake, Springfield, Ill., and Baltimore, Md., 1928), pp. 75–76 n. Apparently Morton does not draw directly either from Harvey or from Harvey’s most important follower, Richard Lower (Tractatus de Corde, London, 1669). See Harvey’s treatise in Leake’s edition, pp. 73–76, and Lower’s treatise, prefaced by an introduction and translation by K. J. Franklin, in R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford, ix. sigs. G¹–G². Harvey supposes, for the sake of his argument, that the left ventricle holds one half ounce (four drams), three drams, or, as he says, even one dram. Lower says, perhaps through information from other sources, that Harvey estimated two ounces. On this vital point in the computation Harvey is indefinite, since it does not matter to his argument. Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. viii, ch. vii, estimates that there are 64 pulses per minute, 3,840 per hour; that there is one dram of blood in the left ventricle; and that the weight of the whole mass of blood is “scarcely above 10 Pounds.” Hence he arrives at the estimate that all the blood circulates through the heart three times each hour. Lower estimates six times, Morton thirteen.

185. Many of the notions here go back to some of the brief treatises in Aristotle’s Parva Naturalia: namely, De Somno et Vigilia, De Somnis, and De Divinatione per Somnum. Legrand, Institutio Philosophiae, Pt. viii, ch. xx, reveals close verbal correspondences; for example: “Waking is the free Exercise of the Senses, depending on the uninterrupted influence of Spirits into the Organs.”

186. This chapter, somewhat remotely related to the Historia Animalium, echoes the Cartesian discussion of the animal soul touched upon previously in Chapters 22, 26, and 28.

187. Morton’s “reactionary” logic is discussed at some length in Perry Miller, The New England Mind (pp. 121–123). A glance at Mr. Miller’s index will reveal, moreover, his considerable use of the Compendium Physicae in the synthesis of seventeenth-century New England thought which he has made.

188. The creation, duration, and end of the world, old problems all, were peculiarly the concern of seventeenth-century thinkers. Scientists, literary men, and theologians were alike anxious to defend theistic first causes against the “modern Epicureans,” by whom were meant Gassendi and Thomas Hobbes; while even Sir Isaac Newton gave of his enthusiasm to the interpretation of the apocalyptic writings. The full story of the innumerable attacks upon the elusive Epicureans, i.e., materialists, is still to be written. Some hints may be gained from J. M. Robertson, A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern (2nd ed., London, 1906), 11. 60–125; G. D. Hadzits, Lucretius and His Influence, pp. 284–317; and L. I. Bredvold, “Dryden, Hobbes, and the Royal Society,” Modern Philology, xxv. 417–438. For an introduction to the enormous literature on the duration and end of the world, see the articles on Chiliasm, Eschatology, and the Millennium in any good encyclopaedia.

189. In addition to comment on the matter in his Experimental Philosophy, Power wrote a manuscript “Essay on the World’s Duration,” now in the British Museum. See the article on Power in the Dictionary of National Biography, and compare with the note on p. 51, above.

190. From the Rogers MS.

191. Giovanni Battista Baliano (d 1666) was an Italian physician and mathematician.

192. The reference is to Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum Novum (Bologna, 1651).

193. Johann Hevel, Selenographia sive Lunae Descriptio (Danzig, 1647). The information here, however, is in Wallis’s article.

Charles Morton1

Charles Morton 1