July 2d A.D. 1621.

He lived, died, and was forgotten in the parish of St Christopher.
Henceforward, whenever Englishmen and Americans, merchants and scholars,
rich and poor, men of genius and men of money, enter this little'
Garden,' let them read there in English what Henry Percy originally set
up in Latin, the above inscription.

An impression has gone abroad, traceable chiefly to Aubrey and to
Anthony à Wood, that Hariot was unsound in religious principles and
matters of belief; that he was, in fact, not only a Deist himself, but
that he exerted a baleful influence over Raleigh and his History as well
as over the Earl of Northumberland. Not to misstate this utterly
unfounded imputation, the very words of Wood, as first printed in his
Athenæ in 1691, and never since modified, are here given in full: ' But
notwithstanding his great skill in mathematics, he had strange thoughts
of the scripture, and always undervalued the old story of the creation
of the world, and could never believe that trite position, _Ex nihilo
nihil fit._ He made a _Philosophical Theology,_ wherein he cast off the
OLD TESTAMENT, so that consequently the New would have no foundation. He
wasaDeist, and his doctrine he did impart to the said Count [the Earl]
and to Sir Walt. Raleigh when he was compiling the _History of the
World,_ and would controvert the matter with eminent divines of those
times; who therefore having no good opinion of him, did look on the
manner of his death as a judgment upon him for those matters, and for
nullifying the scripture.'

It is needless to say that in all our investigations into the life,
actions, and character of this eminent philosopher and Christian, from
the time when, as a young man in 1585, he took delight in reading the