“A time would come when men would be able to stretch out their eyes as snails do (Wren worked with a thirty-six foot glass at Oxford) and extend them to fifty feet in length, by which means they should be able to discover ten thousand times as many stars as we can.” Of this Professor Hinks says, “Rather poor stuff, suddenly rising into this most interesting conclusion--‘and find the Galaxy to be myriads of them, and every nebulous star appearing as if it were the Firmament of some other world ... bury’d in the vast abyss of intermundious vacuum.’ What would we not give [Professor Hinks continues] for fuller knowledge of what was in Wren’s mind when he wrote this passage so strangely before its time, so strongly suggestive of the island universe theory of spiral nebulæ to-day.” There was also the matter of the method for constructing solar eclipses. The lay reader may be spared bibliographical details, into which I have dived, but Professor Hinks makes this significant comment: “Wren was the first to discover the graphical method of computing eclipses that, with some modifications due to much improved tables, remains by far the most instructive, though not the most numerically accurate way of calculating ... and is in use to-day for the graphical prediction of occultations.” It was a practical thought of Wren that the Monument should be used as a gigantic telescope, and members of the Royal Society tried so to use it, but failed, because passing coaches caused vibrations. He had a like idea for the great south staircase at St. Paul’s, but again, for practical reasons, it broke down. The biographers of Wren have made great play with a story taken from a manuscript bound up in the heirloom _Parentalia_. Miss Milman referred to “the problem which Pascal, ... under the pseudonym of Jean de Montfert, challenged the mathematicians of England to answer by a certain day. He accompanied the challenge with a promise of a prize of twenty pistoles to the successful competitor. Christopher Wren solved the problem, but for some unexplained reason never received the prize, while the problem from Kepler which he set in return seems never to have been solved.” The facts are rather different. In June, 1658, Pascal put out a challenge to all mathematicians (not English alone) to find a solution for certain problems connected with a cycloid, the curve described by a point on the circumference of a circle when that circle rolls along a straight line--_e.g._, a nail on the rim of a carriage-wheel.