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. Thomas Hariot was born at Oxford, or as Anthony à Wood with more than his usual quaint-ness expresses it, ‘tumbled out of his mother’s womb into the lap of the Oxonian muses in 1560.’ He was a ‘bateler or commoner of St Mary’s hall.’ He ‘took the degree of bachelor of arts in 1579, and in the latter end of that year did compleat it by determination in Schoolstreet.’ Nothing of his boyhood, or of his family, except a few hints in his will, has come to light. It is not known precisely at what time Hariot joined Walter Raleigh, who was only eight years his senior. From what their friend Hakluyt says of them both, their intimate friendship and mutually serviceable connection were already an old story as early as 1587. On the eighth calends of March 1587, that is on the 22d of February 1588, present reckoning, Hakluyt wrote from Paris to Raleigh in London,