pressed himself with reference to the cruelties practised towards the slaves in Jamaica, in a manner equally unworthy of the philanthropist and of the philosopher. Speaking of the blacks, he says, "After they are whipped till they are raw, some put on their skins pepper and salt, to make them smart; at other times, their masters will drop melted wax on their skins, and use several very exquisite torments. These punishments are sometimes merited by the blacks, who are a very perverse generation of people; and though they appear harsh, yet are scarce equal to some of their crimes, and inferior to what punishments other European nations inflict on their slaves in the East

Indies."

With all his abilities as a naturalist,

Sir Hans Sloane is to be considered rather as a diligent and discriminating collector, than as a man of profound science, original ideas, or philosophical investigation. As a medical practitioner, the suavity and politeness of his manners greatly conduced to his employment. He was the first in England who introduced into general practice the use of the bark; and he greatly accelerated the progress of inoculation, by performing that operation on several of the royal family. His portrait hangs in the British Museum; and in the centre of the Botanical Garden, at Chelsea, which he gave to the Apothecaries' Company, a statue of him is erected, by Rysbrach, the execution of which is admirable, and the likeness striking.

JOHN KEILL was born at Edinburgh, in the year 1671, and educated in the university of that city, where he graduated M. A. His tutor in mathematics, in which he early excelled, was Dr. David Gregory; from whom Keill learnt the principles of the Newtonian philosophy, and imbibed them with great ardour. In 1694, he accompanied his tutor to the University of Oxford, where he became a member of Baliol College, and obtained one of the Scotch exhibitions in that society. He was not long in preparing himself to read lectures upon natural philosophy; and he is said to have been the first who taught the doctrines of the Principia by the experiments on which they are founded. His lectures were attended by numerous students, and procured him high reputation, which was further increased by his Examination of Burnet's Theory of the Earth; in which work he is generally allowed to have completely refuted the absurd system which was the object of his attack. In his Examination, he also made some remarks upon Whiston's theory on the same subject; and it, consequently, drew from that eccentric divine, as well as from Dr. Burnet, a printed reply. Our philosopher

answered both in the same volume, in 1699; and so satisfactorily exposed the false reasoning and ignorance of science in Burnet, that his theory of the earth is now no longer read but as an ingenious romance.

In 1700, on the appointment of Dr. Millington, Sedleian professor of natural philosophy at Oxford, to be physician in ordinary to King William. Mr. Keill was left as his deputy, and added considerably to his fame by his lectures. About the same time, the term of his Scotch exhibition being nearly out, he removed from Baliol to Christchurch College, by the invitation of its dean, Dr. Aldrich. In 1702, he published the substance of his lectures in a treatise, entitled Introductio ad veram Physicam. This work met with great applause, both at home and abroad, particularly in France, where it was considered the best introduction to The Principia, when the Newtonian philosophy began to obtain in that country. A second edition of it appeared in 1705, with two additional lectures; and a third was published, some years after the author's death, at the instance of M. Maupertius.

Mr. Keill was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, some time previous to

1708; in which year he communicated to their Transactions a paper On the Laws of Attraction, and its Physical Principles. This was in support of some of Newton's doctrines on optics; and, about the same time, he vindicated Sir Isaac from the charge of Leibnitz, that the former had no claim to the invention of fluxions. In the famous, but disgraceful controversy, which took place between these two eminent philosophers, Leibnitz was not without partisans; and Keill, therefore, did no inconsiderable service to Sir Isaac, in proving, what has since been allowed, that from him Leibnitz had taken this method, only changing the name and notation. This enraged Lelbnitz, who addressed a letter to Sir Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society, insisting that Mr. Keill should be made to disown his assertion, for that he was absolutely ignorant of the name of the method of fluxions till they appeared in the mathematical works of Dr. Wallis. Keill replied, by maintaining his former opinions; and Leibnitz, still more incensed, wrote another letter to the president, affecting to consider the subject of our memoir as an upstart beneath his dignity to answer, and repeating his desire that he might be silenced. Upon this, a committee was appointed, which came to a conclusion in favour of Mr. Keill. The controversy, however, was carried on for some time: and one of Keill's latest publications was a Latin epistle to the celebrated John Bernouilli, in defence of Newton, with the arms of Scotland in the title page, and the motto "Nemo me impune lacessit."

In 1709, the subject of our memoir went out to New England as treasurer to the German exiles from the Palatinate; and, on his return, in the following year, he was elected Savilian

professor of astronomy at Oxford. In 1711, he cominunicated to the philosophical Transactions a paper On the Rarity of Matter and the Tenuity of its Composition; wherein he pointed out some phenomena which were inexplicable upon the supposition of a plenum; in support of which, the Cartesians had made some attacks upon Newton. He was, shortly afterwards, made decipherer to Queen Anne; and he held that office, for two years, under George the First. In 1713, he was created M. D. by the University of Oxford; and, in 1715, published an edition of Commandine's Euclid, with the addition of two tracts by himself, entitled Trigonometriæ planæ et Spherica Elementa, and De Natura et Arithmetica Logarithmorum. He is said to have esteemed these beyond all his other performances, and they are certainly remarkable for their elegance and perspicuity. In 1718, he published his Introductio ad veram Astronomiam; and afterwards, at the request of the Duchess of Chandos, translated it into English. It was entitled An Introduction to the true Astronomy, or Astronomical Lectures, &c., and appeared but a few months before his death, which took place on the 1st of September, 1721.

His merits, as a philosopher, have been sufficiently shown in the preceding memoir to warrant us in assigning him a very high rank among men of science. If he struck out no new path, he followed the best that was discovered; and certainly, in advocating the truths, and detecting the errors, of philosophy, few have been more zealous or successful. To comprehend Newton's Principia on the first promulgation of them, displayed no common genius; to teach and vindicate them, a very superior order of mind.

JOHN HUTCHINSON, the son of a person of small landed property, was born at Spennythorn, in Yorkshire, in 1674. A gentleman, who boarded at his father's house, instructed him in the

classics and mathematics, in order to qualify him for the office of a steward to some nobleman or gentleman, and in this capacity, he entered the service of Mr. Bathurst, about the year 1683.

in another sense, however, he anwered, in a muttering tone, "I believe, doctor, you will;" and from this, and some other circumstances, he conceived such

a disgust against the doctor, that he dismissed him from further attendance, called in another physician, and never after suffered his presence.

WILLIAM JONES, the son of a small farmer, in the parish of Llanfihangel-the-Bard, in Anglesea, North Wales, was born there in the year 1680. He received an ordinary education, of which arithmetic was his favourite branch; he afterwards proceeded to the mathematics of his own accord, and commenced his career in life, as a teacher of this science on board a man-of-war, in the fleet under Lord Anson. He was present at the capture of Vigo, and during the pillage by which it was followed, is said to have fixed upon a bookseller's shop, as the object of his plunder; but finding in it no books worth seizing, contented himself with bringing away a pair of scissars, as a trophy of his military success. Previously to this event, which happened in his twenty-second year, he had published A New Compendium of the whole Art of Navigation; and, on his return from abroad, he immediately established himself as a mathematical teacher in London. In 1706, he published his Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos, or a New Introduction to the Mathematics, &c., containing a perspicuous and useful compendium of all the mathematical sciences.

The above works procured their author considerable reputation in the scientific world, whilst his respectable character and inviting manners gained him some noble and substantial friends. Among these was the great Lord Hardwicke, who, on his accession to the chancellorship, conferred upon Jones the office of secretary for the peace. Sir Isaac Newton was also one of his intimate friends; and when Jones afterwards found among some papers of Collins, which fell into his hands, a tract of Newton's, entitled Analysis per Quantitatum Series Fluxiones, ac differentias: cum Enumeratione Linearum tertii ordines, Sir Isaac assisted

him in the publication of it in 1711, accompanied by other pieces on analytical subjects. This tract secured to Newton the honour of having applied the method of infinite series to all sorts of curves, previous to the publication of Mercator's Quadrature of the Hyperbola, and contributed to the decision of the question in dispute between Leibnitz and Newton, respecting the invention of fluxions, in favour of the latter.

After Mr. Jones had been elected a member of the Royal Society, of which he became also a vice-president, he took up his residence at Sherborne Castle, the seat of Lord Macclesfield, to whom he gave instructions in the sciences. Whilst in this situation, the failure of his banker deprived him of almost the whole of his property; for which Lord Macclesfield compensated by procuring for him a sinecure place of considerable emolument. He, shortly afterwards, married a Miss Nix; and after having had three children by her, the youngest of whom was the celebrated Sir William Jones, died of a polypus in the heart, in July, 1749.

"The history of men of letters," says Lord Teignmouth, in his Life of Sir William Jones, "is too often a melancholy detail of human misery, exhibiting the unavailing struggles of genius and learning against penury, and life consumed in fruitless expectation of patronage and reward. We contemplate, with satisfaction, the reverse of this picture in the history of Mr. Jones; as we trace him in his progress from obscurity to distinction, and in his participation of the friendship and beneficence of the first characters of the times." Mr. Jones's papers in the Philosophical Transactions are, A Compendious Disposition of Equations for exhibiting the Relations of Goniometrical Lines; A Tract on Logarithms;

An Account of the Person killed by lightning in Tottenham Court Chapel; and Properties of the Conic Sections, deduced by a compendious method; all of which are to be found in the forty-fourth sixty-first, sixty-second, and sixty-third volumes, respectively. Nichols, in his Anecdotes of Bowyer, says that Mr. Jones had also completed, and sent to press, the first sheet of a

He

general introduction to the mathematical and philosophical works of Newton, when illness put an end to his further progress in the design. left the manuscripts, at his death, to the care of Lord Macclesfield, and that nobleman undertook to publish them, but died without performing his promise, after which they were never found.

THIS illustrious mathematician, the son of a person who had a place in the Excise, and a small estate at Thurlston, near Penniston, in Yorkshire, was born there, in 1682. He was but a twelvemonth old when he lost, not only his sight, but also his eye-balls, which came away in abscesses, from an attack of the small-pox. It was, however, soon apparent, that his blindness had not retarded the developement of his intellects, which displayed themselves in a manner that induced his parents to send him, when yet very young, to the grammar-school at Penniston. In what mode instruction was conveyed to him we have no account, but his progress in the classics, aided by his own subsequent application, was such, that he eventually became able to follow, as easily as his own language, the works of Euclid, Archimedes, and Diophantus, as they were read to him in their original Greek. On leaving school, he studied arithmetic under his father, and the rapidity with which he made very long calculations, discovered in him the germ of that mathematical genius which he afterwards so brilliantly displayed. His talents in this line having attracted the attention of Richard West Underbank, Esq., that gentleman undertook to be his instructor in the principles of algebra and geometry; and, about the same time, he gained the friendship and assistance of Dr. Nettleton. Under these voluntary preceptors, he made rapid improvement, and, in a short time, was fitter to be the teacher, than the pupil, of his masters. He was in his nineteenth year, when his father, anxious

to afford every possible encouragement to his growing talents, sent him to an academy at Attercliff, near Sheffield; but his stay here was short, and, on returning home, he prosecuted his studies, in his own way, with greater advantage.

His education had, hitherto, been at the expense of his father, who had a large family, and was not in very flourishing circumstances. His friends, therefore, in order to relieve him from further burden, and to give young Saunderson an opportunity of gaining his own living, resolved to send him to Cambridge, not as a scholar, but as a tutor. Accordingly, in 1707, he took up his residence in Christ's College; and, without being admitted a member, was allotted a chamber, by the society, with the use of the library, and other assistances. He had not long commenced lecturer, before his fame filled the university, and drew towards him the attention and admiration of the whole scientific world. Philosophers, as well as students, formed part of his audience; and numbers came from all parts to hear a blind man discourse on the nature of light and colours, and explain the theory of vision, the effects of glasses, the phenomenon of the rainbow, &c. &c. The other topics of his lectures, besides optics, were, universal arithmetic, and Newton's Principia, the illustrious author of which came to Cambridge to visit Saunderson, and frequently conversed with him on the most difficult part of his works.

At the same time that the subject of our memoir was delivering his lectures, the Lucasian professorship was held by the celebrated Whiston, upon whose