 Boyle was one of the leading intellectual figures of the seventeenth century and an important influence on Locke and Newton (Anstey 2018). He was an experimental philosopher, unwilling to construct abstract theories to which his experimental results had to conform. “Our Boyle,” Oldenburg wrote to Spinoza, “is one of those who are distrustful enough of their reasoning to wish that the phenomena should agree with it” (Hall &amp; Hall 1965–1977, 2:38). Boyle, a champion of both the corpuscularian doctrine and the Baconian method of natural history, preferred to report the results of his experiments, including negative results, and frequently lamented the fact that we lacked “histories” (collections of experimental results and accurate observations) in various fields of scientific endeavour. He performed so many experiments that he was able, at one “time to loose … at once near five centuries of Experiments of my own” (BP 9:28). Nor was this an isolated loss; nonetheless the number, variety and scope of his experiments were such that he carried on working and publishing with no particular difficulty. “His books,” as Huygens remarked to Leibniz immediately after Boyle’s death, “are full of experiments” (Huygens 1888, 10:239). Moreover, experiments were exactly what he was interested in, he had a certain missionary zeal in spreading the corpuscularian gospel, but he was not himself interested in detailed system  building,[1]  a fact that was commonly noted. Leibniz told Huygens that he was “astonished” that Boyle “who has so many fine experiments, [had] not come to some theory of chemistry after meditating so long on them. Yet in his books, and for all the consequences that he draws from his observations, he concludes only what we all know, that everything happens mechanically. He is perhaps too reserved. Excellent men should leave us even their conjectures; they are wrong if they wish to give us only those truths that are certain” (Leibniz to Huygens, Dec. 29, 1691, in Huygens 1888, 10:228). Boyle was ahead of his time. In the next century d’Alembert wrote “the taste for systems … is today almost entirely banished from works of merit … a writer among us who praised systems would have come too late” (d’Alembert 1751 [1995,  94]).[2]