Jacques Rohault

[1] Rohault was born in Amiens, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, and educated in Paris.

Having grown up with the conventional scholastic philosophy of his day, he adopted and popularised the new Cartesian physics.

Rohault held to the mechanical philosophy, and gave qualified support to its "corpuscular" or atomic form of explanation, assuming that "small figured bodies" were the underlying physical reality.

[6] The translation of Samuel Clarke (initially into Latin) gained an independent status, and numerous editions, through its annotations that purported to correct it with reference to the theories of Isaac Newton.

[7] A wide range of experiments used by Rohault included some mentioned by Descartes, and two well-known ones of Blaise Pascal, but also others taken from medical men: Gaspard Asselli, Louis Gayant, William Harvey, Jean Pecquet, and Nicholas Steno.