Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was born at Lismore Castle in Ireland, the fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork. After schooling at Eton and a continental tour with a Genevan tutor, he settled at Stalbridge in Dorset and in the mid-1650s moved to Oxford, where with his assistant Robert Hooke he built the air pump described in New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air (1660). He was a founding Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote widely on chemistry, medicine, pneumatics and natural theology, paid for translations of Scripture, and by his will endowed the Boyle Lectures in defence of the Christian religion. He died in London on 31 December 1691.
The Sceptical Chymist is a philosophical dialogue in which Robert Boyle tests the two reigning theories of what bodies are made of: the four elements of the Aristotelians (earth, water, air and fire) and the three principles, or tria prima, of the Paracelsian chemists (salt, sulphur and mercury). Both schools appealed to the same evidence, the analysis of mixed bodies by fire.
