mathematician and philosopher.  Anthony was indefatigable in his researches into the biography of Hariot who was both an Oxford man and an Oxford scholar.  He happily succeeded in mousing out a goodly number of recondite and particular occurrences of Hariot’s life.  He managed, however, to state very many of them erroneously ; and he drew hence some important inferences, the reverse, as it now appears, of historical truth.  This naturally leads one to inquire into his authorities.  Wood’s account of Hariot appeared in his first edition of 1691, and has not been improved in the two subsequent editions.  For most of his facts he appears to have been indebted to Dr John Wallis’s Algebra, first published in 1685, though ready for the printer in 1676 ; and for his fictions to poor old gossiping Aubrey; while his inferences, in respect to Hariot’s deism and disbelief in the Scriptures, are probably his own, as we find no sufficient trace of them prior to the appearance of his Athenæ, unless it be in Chief Justice Popham’s unjust charge at Winchester in 1603, when he is said to have twitted Raleigh from the bench with having been ’ bedeviled ’ by Hariot.  Dr Wallis appears to have obtained part of his facts from John Collins, who had been in his usual indefatigable manner looking up Hariot and his papers as early as 1649, and wrote to the doctor of his success several letters between 1667 and 1673, which maybe seen in Professor Rigaud’s Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols, Oxford, 1841, 8°.

Since 1784, from time to time, several other writers have partly repeated Wood’s estimate and added several new facts, as will be shown further on.  But it has been reserved for the Hercules Club, now just three hundred years after Hariot left the University, to bring to light new and important contemporary evidence, sufficient, it is believed, to considerably modify our general estimate of Hariot’s life and character, and to raise him from the second rank of mathematicians to which Montucla coolly relegated him nearly a century ago to the pre-eminence of being one of the foremost scholars of his age, not alone of England but of the world.  Had he been walled around by church bigotry like his friend and contemporary Galileo he would unquestionably by the originality and brilliancy of his observations and discoveries have rivalled, or perhaps have shared that philosopher’s victories in science.  At all events it is believed that the new matter is sufficient to reopen the courts of criticism and revision in which some of the decisions respecting the use of perspective glasses, the invention of the telescope, the discoveries of the spots on the sun, the satellites of Jupiter and the horns of Venus may be reconsidered and perhaps reversed.  It is believed that in logical analysis, in philosophy, and in many other departments of science few in his day were his equals, while in pure mathematics none was his superior.