'I was born,' he goes on, 'at Denby, in Derbyshire, in the year 1646, on the 19th day of August, at 7 hours 16 minutes after noon. My father, named Stephen, was the third son of Mr. William Flamsteed, of Little Hallam; my mother, Mary, was the daughter of Mr. John Spateman, of Derby, ironmonger. From these two I derived my beginning, whose parents were of known integrity, honesty, and fortune, as they [were] of equal extraction and ingenuity; betwixt whom I [was] tenderly educated (by reason of my natural weakness, which required more than ordinary care) till I was aged three years and a fortnight; when my mother departed, leaving my father a daughter, then not a month old, with me, then weak, to his fatherly care and provision.' The weakly, motherless boy became at an early age a voracious reader. At first, he says-- 'I began to affect the volubility and ranting stories of romances; and at twelve years of age I first left off the wild ones, and betook myself to read the better sort of them, which, though they were not probable, yet carried no seeming impossibility in the fiction. Afterwards, as my reason increased, I gathered other real histories; and by the time I was fifteen years old I had read, of the ancients, Plutarch's _Lives_, Appian's and Tacitus's _Roman Histories_, Holingshed's _History of the Kings of England_, Davies's _Life of Queen Elizabeth_, Saunderson's of _King Charles the First_, Heyling's _Geography_, and many others of the moderns; besides a company of romances and other stories, of which I scarce remember a tenth at present.' Flamsteed received his education at the free school at Derby, where he continued until the Whitsuntide of 1662, when he was nearly sixteen years of age. Two years earlier than this, however, a great misfortune fell upon him. 'At fourteen years of age,' he writes, 'when I was nearly arrived to be the head of the free-school, [I was] visited with a fit of sickness, that was followed with a consumption and other distempers, which yet did not so much hinder me in my learning, but that I still kept my station till the form broke up, and some of my fellows went to the Universities; for which, though I was designed, my father thought it not advisable to send me, by reason of my distemper.'