It was during the lifetime of Robert Boyle that our forefathers began tocome into close contact with the races and nationalities of the outerworld. When he was born in County Cork in the year 1627, small andisolated bands of Englishmen were elbowing Red Indians from the easternsea-board of North America; before his death in London in 1691, at theage of sixty-four, he had seen these pioneer bands become united into aBritish fringe stretching almost without a break from Newfoundland toFlorida. Neither he nor any one else in England could then have guessedthat in less than two centuries the narrow fringe of colonists wouldhave spread from shore to shore, thus carpeting a continent with a newpeople. It was in his time, too, that English merchants and sailors madea closer acquaintance with the peoples of India, of the Far East, andwith the sea-board natives of Africa and of South America. We have onlyto turn to the six splendid volumes in which his experiments,observations, and writings are preserved to see how he viewed the worldwhich his countrymen were opening up beneath his eyes. In a short paper,drafted some time before his death, he gives the most minute directionsto guide navigators in drawing up reports of newly discovered lands. Hisdirections relate to every conceivable property or aspect of[Pg 4] a newcountry—its geography, mineral wealth, natural products, climate—allbut its inhabitants. Like many Englishmen of his time, Boyle conceivedthat his duty by native peoples began and ended when he had seen thatthey were supplied with copies of the Bible. For him, and for most ofhis contemporaries, there seem to have been no racial problems; for theydid not regard the meeting and mingling of diverse races or of peoplesof different nationalities as matters which deserved investigation andexplanation. Boyle witnessed the acutest phases of the 'plantation' ofIreland, but the inquiries he set on foot regarding that country were:'How it cometh to pass that there are not frogs, toads, snakes, moles,nightingales, rarely magpies' within its borders; he inquired, too,concerning the true nature of 'diverse things which the Irish foolishlyreport of St. Patrick'—especially concerning the 'birds turned intostones for chirping when St. Patrick was preaching'. There were, ofcourse, racial and national problems in Boyle's time, but they had notthen presented themselves before the tribunal of the public mind asmatters demanding investigation and treatment.
We need not blame the statesmen and writers of Boyle's time for failingto recognize the inward significance of national and racialmanifestations any more than we condemn his contemporary physicians forfailing to separate from the mass of disease such conditions as areknown to modern medical men as appendicitis and typhoid fever. Typho