STEPHEN HALES 445
fifth of its volume: for these researches Priestley received the Copley medal in 1773.
The details of the private life of Stephen Hales are neither numer- ous nor romantic. The son of Thomas^ eldest son of Sir Sobert Hales of Beckesboum^ Stephen was born in 1677 near the pleasant village of Beckesboum in Kent, not far from Canterbury. His mother was Mary, daughter and heiress of Richard Wood, of Abbof s Langley. At the age of nineteen he went to Cambridge, being entered at Bene^t College (now Corpus Christi), of which he became a fellow in 1703. In due time he graduated M.A. and he took his B.D. degree in 1711. His early scientific leanings may be inferred from his having studied anatomy, chemistry and botany as a recreation. Accompanied by William Stukeley, a fellow student, later M.D. and P.R.S., Hales is re- ported to have studied field botany on the Grog-Magog Hills and on Cherry Hunt Moor by the aid of Bay's catalogue of local plants, and also at this time to have made collections of fossils and of butterfiies. It was as a student, too, that he contrived to make a cast in lead of the lungs of a dog. He did not neglect astronomy, for according to one account he constructed a " planetarium in brass " or, as it was later called, an "Orrery on Newtonian principles. Having taken Holy Orders, Hales was presented in 1710 to the "perpetual curacy" of Teddington in Middlesex. Not long after he resigned his fellowship on being presented to the living of Porlock in Somerset ; this he finally exchanged for that of Parringdon in Hampshire. The date of his marriage is uncertain : it is thought to have been in 1719 ; his wife died childless in 1721 ; Hales did not marry again. It was at Teddington that by far the greater number of his experiments were carried out. At his own expense he rebuilt the tower of the parish church of St. Mary's- in-the-Meadows. In 1718, at the comparatively early age of forty, Hales was elected into the Eoyal Society, and twenty-two years later was awarded the Copley medal — the highest honor in the gift of that learned body. Until within a year or two of his death he commxmicated the results of his manifold researches in the form of papers to the Eoyal Society. He published, however, in book form several treatises : his "Vegetable Statics" saw the light in 1726, and the "Haemostatics" or Volume II. in 1733. Volume I. is dedicated to " His Eoyal High- ness George Prince of Wales" and Volume II. "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty." This " George, Prince of Wales," and the " King's Most Excellent Majesty" are the same person, for in 1726 George I. was still reigning, but by 1733 his son (Jeorge, who had been Prince of Wales, was now George II.
Although, then. Hales wrote extensively on vegetable and animal physiology, chemistry and medicine — for he discoursed on the alleged virtues of tar-water and investigated solvents for stone in the bladder — it is as a pioneer sanitarian that he must ever live in our grateful
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