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°.