Experimental philosophy was a product of Bacon’s radical reform of natural inquiry. Baconians such as Robert Boyle regarded experiment as a necessary condition for the philosophical discovery of material causes. A usually decorous Boyle gladly joined in the ridiculing of traditional natural philosophy as an unremittingly discursive pursuit, whose glaring failure was its complete lack of contact with nature. Experimenting, however, entailed labour in the laboratory. Boyle was an aristocrat, yet manual work was associated with dependency and servility. According to Nathaniel Highmore, Boyle did not accept that his ‘blood and descent’ might be jeopardized because he was ‘married to the arts’, that is, to the mechanical and chemical arts – enterprises demanding a direct hands-on approach. While Highmore’s comments suggest that Boyle was no more averse to manual toil than he was to intellectual sweat of the brow, Steven Shapin argues cogently that it probably was not Boyle who got his hands dirty. On Shapin’s analysis, ‘technicians’ laboured while Boyle philosophized. Was this division of labour in keeping with the Baconian method, grounded as it was on the union of the manual and the cognitive? What difference does it make for Boyle’s efforts at realizing experimental philosophy if he did not in fact engage in the manual labour of experiment? This paper considers how Shapin’s division of labour can be reconciled with Boyle’s Baconian programme for ‘the happy Marriage, or combination’ of theory and practice.