These words describe the struggles which every youth not endowed with the highest genius must make to achieve success. They show, moreover, the kindly feeling toward others and the delight he took throughout life in assisting anyone interested in mathematics. Oughtred’s passion for this study is the more remarkable as neither at Eton nor at Cambridge did it receive emphasis. Even after his time at Cambridge mathematical studies and their applications were neglected there. Jeremiah Horrox was at Cambridge in 1633-35, desiring to make himself an astronomer. “But many impediments,” says Horrox, “presented themselves: the tedious difficulty of the study itself deterred a mind not yet formed; the want of means oppressed, and still oppresses, the aspirations of my mind: but that which gave me most concern was that there was no one who could instruct me in the art, who could even help my endeavours by joining me in the study; such was the sloth and languor which had seized all. . . . . I found that books must be used instead of teachers.”[3] Some attention was given to Greek mathematicians, but the works of Italian, German, and French algebraists of the latter part of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century were quite unknown at Cambridge in Oughtred’s day. It was part of his life-work as a mathematician to make algebra, as it was being developed in his time, accessible to English youths. At the age of twenty-three Oughtred invented his Easy Way of Delineating Sun-Dials by Geometry, which, though not published until about half a century later, in the first English edition of Oughtred’s Clavis mathematicae in 1647, was in the meantime translated into Latin by Christopher Wren, then a Gentleman Commoner of Wadham College, Oxford, now best known through his architectural creations. In 1600 Oughtred wrote a monograph on the construction of sun-dials upon a plane of any inclination, but that paper was withheld by him from publication until 1632. Sun-dials were interesting objects of study, since watches and pendulum clocks were then still unknown. All sorts of sun-dials, portable and non-portable, were used at that time and long afterward. Several of the college buildings at Oxford and Cambridge have sun-dials even at the present time. AS RECTOR AND AMATEUR MATHEMATICIAN It was in 1604 that Oughtred entered upon his professional life-work as a preacher, being instituted to the vicarage of Shalford in Surrey. In 1610 he was made rector of Albury, where he spent the remainder of his long life. Since the era of the Reformation two of the rectors of Albury obtained great celebrity from their varied talents and acquirements—our William Oughtred and Samuel Horsley. Oughtred continued to devote his spare time to mathematics, as he had done in college. A great mathematical invention made by a Scotchman soon commanded his attention—the invention of logarithms. An informant writes as follows: