O’Glacan’s name introduces us to the middle period, if indeed it does not belong there. Inter arma silent leges, and it may be added, scientific work.  The troublous state of Ireland for many long years fully explains the absence of men of science in any abundance until the end of the eighteenth century.  Still there are three names which can never be forgotten, belonging to the period in question.  Sir Hans Sloane was born at Killileagh, in Ulster, in 1660.  He studied medicine abroad, went to London where he settled, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.  He published a work on the West Indies, but his claim to undying memory is the fact that it was the bequest of his most valuable and extensive collections to the nation which was the beginning and foundation of the British Museum, perhaps the most celebrated institution of its kind in the world.  Sloane’s collection, it should be added, contained an immense number of valuable books and manuscripts, as well as of objects more usually associated with the idea of a museum.  He died in 1753.

The Hon. Robert Boyle was born at Lismore, in the county Waterford, in 1627, being the fourteenth child of the first Earl of Cork.  On his tombstone he is described as “The Father of Chemistry and the Uncle of the Earl of Cork”, and, indeed, in his Skyptical Chimist (1661), he assailed, and for the time overthrew, the idea of the alchemists that there was a materia prima, asserting as he did that theory of chemical “elements” which held good until the discoveries in connection with radium led to a modification in chemical teaching.  This may be said of Boyle, that his writings profoundly modified scientific opinion, and his name will always stand in the forefront amongst those of chemists.  He made important improvements in the air-pump, was one of the earliest Fellows of the Royal Society, and founded the “Boyle Lectures.”  He died in 1691.

Sir Thomas Molyneux was born in Dublin, in 1661, of a family which had settled in Ireland about 1560-70.  He practised as a physician in his native city, was the first person to describe the Irish Elk and to demonstrate the fact that the Giant’s Causeway was a natural and not, as had been previously supposed, an artificial production.  He was the author of many other scientific observations.  He died in 1733.

We may now turn to more recent times, and it will be convenient to divide our subjects according to the branch of science in which they were distinguished, and to commence with

MATHEMATICIANS,

of whom Ireland may boast of a most distinguished galaxy.