presence you in counter, but gratitude with a will in act to be vsefull
vnto you and a power in proxima potentia ; wch I will not leaue also
till I haue broughte ad actum. If you in the meane time can further it,
tell wher in I may doe you seruice, and see how wholie you shall dispose
of me.

Your most assured and louing friend
Tra'uenti the longest day of, 1610. Willm Lower.
~ _Addressed:_ To his espesial good frind
Mr. Thomas Hariot

Seal of Arms, _(B. M. Add._ 6789.) at Sion neere London.

[Tra'venti or Trafenty, near Lower Court, is eight or nine miles
south-west of Caermarthen, near the confluence of the rivers Taf and
Cywyn.]

The writer is fortunately able to throw some light upon these letters of
Lower to Hariot. In _the Monatlicbe Correspondenz Vol._ 8, 1803,
published by F. X. von Zach at Gotha, pages 47-56, is a most interesting
fragment of an original letter inEnglish toHariot. Dr Zach says that he
found this letter at Petworth in 1784, and it being without date or
signature he confidently assigned its authorship to the Earl of
Northumberland, and guessed the date to have been prior to 1619. In his
many notes he is in raptures over his discovery, and deplores the
misfortune of its breaking off in the most interesting place just as the
Earl was about to announce the discovery of the elliptical orbit of the
comet of 1607, as reasoned out of Hariot's observations and the writings
of Kepler. This famous letter has been used or copied in many places,
particularly in Ersch and Gru-ber's Algemeine Encyklopadie under Hariot.