OF all the scientific worthies of the seventeenth century, none will be remembered longer than Robert Hooke, whose views and activities influenced the progress of scientific thought and practical physics in an incalculable degree. Somewhat younger than Boyle, Wilkins, Wren, Mariotte, von Guericke and Huygens, but the senior of Flamsteed, Newton, Leibniz and Halley, he belonged to an age in which, in the words of Macaulay, “it was almost necessary to the character of a fine gentleman to have something to say about air-pumps and telescopes”. Born when James I was king, Hooke was a schoolboy in Westminster when Charles I was beheaded, a scholar at Oxford when Cromwell was Protector and an assistant to Boyle at the time of the Restoration. As curator, and sometime secretary, he faithfully served the Royal Society during practically all the reigns of Charles II, James II and William and Mary, and died a year after Anne ascended the throne. Affairs of State and Church, however, made little difference to Hooke, and in the main his life was taken up with writing, lecturing and experiment. In the records of the first forty years of the Royal Society, no name is more frequently met with than his, and in his various capacities of curator, Gresham professor of geometry and Cutlerian lecturer on mechanics, he probably delivered more scientific discourses and made more experiments than any other man of his day. His influence was felt both at home and abroad, and the story of his life belongs to the history of our race in the same way as those of his contemporaries Dryden, Locke, Evelyn and Pepys. Hooke was the son of the Rev. John Hooke, a curate of Freshwater, Isle of Wight, where he was born on July 18, 1635. He was a somewhat delicate child, and was kept at home until his father's death in 1648, when, after a short time with Lely, the portrait painter, he entered Westminster School and thus came under the famous Dr. Busby. Studious and inventive far beyond the average, at eighteen years of age he became a chorister and servitor at Christ Church, Oxford, and during the next eight or nine years gained the friendship of Wilkins, Ward, Willis, Petty, Boyle and other men of science, whose meetings at Oxford had much to do with the inauguration of the Royal Society in 1660.