It remains now to give some personal account of Thomas Hariot, whose first book as the first of the labors of the hercules club has been reproduced. Every incident in the life of a man of eminent genius and originality in any country is a lesson to the world’s posterity deserving careful record. Hitherto dear quaint old positive antiquarianly slippery Anthony à Wood in his _Athenes Oxoniensis_ embodies nearly all of our accepted notions of this great English 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°.