EDMUND HALLEY, the second English philosopher of the later day of Newton, was born October 29, 1656, at his father's country-house at Haggerston, near London: Mr. Halley the father was a wealthy soap-boiler in Winchester Street. The son was educated at St. Paul's School, of which he was captain at fifteen years of age. He had then begun to lay the foundation of that store of various knowledge for which he was afterwards so remarkable. At Midsummer, 1673, when, before he was quite seventeen, he was entered at Queen's College, Oxford, he was strong in Latin,

VOL. Xil.

B

Greek, and Hebrew, and stronger in mathematics and astronomy: he had discovered for himself the alteration of the variation of the needle, before he found in books that it was already known. In 1676 he commenced his career by publishing in the Philosophical Transactions a direct geometrical method of finding the aphelia and eccentricities of the planets.

The father, a tradesman of the old school, supplied his son liberally with astronomical instruments. To understand this, the reader must remember that the London man of business in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries was generally a friend of knowledge, and not unfrequently a promoter of it who had learned its value at one of the Universities. The poor creature of the eighteenth century, who is described as asking his son what learning was worth on 'Change, and whether Aristotle ever made cent. per cent., belongs to another race of men, which will soon be quite extinct. The schism between learning and commerce seems to have been a consequence of the two revolutions, and of the religious and political animosities to which they led. It is by no means unlikely that IIalley's father was capable of reading and judging of his son's first paper. Be this as it may, the son, thus encouraged by his father, applied himself to the observation of Jupiter and Saturn, and detected, for the first time, that acceleration of the one and retardation of the other, the explanation of which has since been made so strong a confirmation of the theory of gravitation. Desiring to amend the tables of these planets, he soon saw that nothing could be done without better catalogues of stars than then existed and learning that Hevelius and Flamsteed were employed on such work in the northern hemisphere, he fixed on the south as the scene of his own operations. With his father's consent, effectively shown by an allowance of 300l. a year, he chose St. Helena as a proper spot from which to observe; for that island he set sail in November, 1676, still a minor, with a recommendation from the king to the East India Company. His principal instruments were a large sextant, quadrant, and telescope, and a pen