172 BOYLE. tisement about the loss of many of his writings, addressed to J. W. to be communicated to those of his friends that are virtuosi; which may serve as a kind of preface to most of his mutilated and unfiuished writings." He here com- plains much of the treatment he had met with fromi plagiaries both at home and abroad; and though it is not easy to do so without incurring the charge of vanity, such is Mr. Boyle's manner, that it tends rather to raise in us a higheradmiration and esteem for him In 1687, he published "The Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymia," one of the productions of his youth; and in the following year "A Disquisition about the final Causes of natural Things; wherein it is inquired, whether, and if at all, with what caution, a naturalist should admit With an Appendix about vitiated Light." Mr. Boyle now finding his health declining fast and anxious to put his numerous papers and accounts of e periments in order, for the benefit of the scientific world, came to a resolutiou to receive no more visitors. To announce this, he put forth an advertisement stating, that his age and sickliness require him to arrange his writings, which are much scattered, and sone of them decayed, and partly destroyed through the misfortune of bis ser- vants having broken a bottle of oil of vitriol over the chest in which they were contained ; and also that his physician and friends had pressingly advised him to decline all visits as causing too great a waste of his spirits. He thus gained time to finish many works; and among others, one, which was never published, he mentions in a letter to a friend as a kind of hermetic legacy to the studious disciples of that art. Preferring the benefit of the whole republic of letters to assisting any branch of it, he now ceased also to com- municate any more papers to the Royal Society ; which afforded him sufficient leisure to publish "Medicina Hy drostatica, or Hydrostatics applied to the Materia Medica, shewing how, by the Weight that divers Bodies used in Physic, have in Water, one may discover whether they them.
