should receive consisted in his notion that he should be an intuitive geometer, seeing those things as self-evident which, as a man, he had been obliged to spend time in acquiring by demonstration. The following passage was written by him in his manuscript of Apollonius,' now in the library of the Royal Society, of which he was an early member.

Ὁ Θεὸς γεωμετρεῖ. Tu autem, Domine, quantus es geometra! Quum enim hæc scientia nullos terminos habeat; cum in sempiternum novorum theorematum inventioni locus relinquatur, etiam penes humanum ingenium; tu uno hæc omnia intuitu perspecta habes, absque catena consequentiarum, absque tædio demonstrationum. Ad cætera pœnè nihil facere potest intellectus noster; et tanquam Brutorum phantasia videtur non nisi incerta quædam somniare; unde in iis quot sunt homines, tot existunt ferè sententiæ. .Te igitur vel ex hac re amare gaudeo, te suspicor, atque illum diem desidero suspiriis fortibus, in quo purgatâ mente et claro oculo non hæc solum omnia absque hac successiva et laboriosa imaginandi cura, verum multo plura et majora ex tuâ bonitate et immensissima sanctissimaque benignitate conspicere et scire concedetur.*

*But, Lord, how great a geometer art thou! For whilst this science has no limits, and opportunity is afforded, even to the human intellect, for the invention of new theorems to all eternity, thou beholdest all these things at a single glance, without the chain of deductions, without the tediousness of demonstration. In other things our intellect can do scarcely anything, and like the ideas of brutes, our thoughts seem little better than the uncertainties of a dream; hence, in such matters, there are almost as many opinions as there are men.... I exult therefore in the love of thee even from this cause; I look up to thee, and with deep sighings long for that day when with a purified mind and a clear eye, I shall be permitted, by thy goodness and infinite and holy benevolence, to see and to know not only these things, but many more and greater, without this continuous and laborious anxiety of thinking.

THOMAS HOBBES of Malmesbury, as he delighted to call himself-in Latin, Thomas Hobbius, or sometimes Hobbesius-was born in that ancient town on the 5th of April, which happened to be Good Friday, in the year 1588. He came in a hurry into this breathing world, in which he was destined to live so long, and to fill so large a space in the eye both of his contemporaries and of posterity. A fright into which his mother was thrown by a rumour of the arrival of the Spanish Armada brought on a premature delivery. Her name was Middleton. His father, whose Christian name was the same with his own, was vicar of Charlton and Westport, a parish lying immediately beyond one of the gates of the town of Malmesbury; but he was far from being a learned theologian; the sum of his qualifications, it is recorded, amounting to being able to read the printed homilies to his congregation in a satisfactory enough way. Besides Thomas, the vicar and his wife had an elder son,

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Edmund, and a daughter. Thomas, according to a narrative of his own life, in Latin hexameters and pentameters, which he addressed, in 1672, to his friend Hieronymus Verdusius, spent his first four years in learning to speak; his next four in learning to read, to cipher, and to write a little he was then, at eight years of age, sent to the grammar-school of his native town, taught by Mr. Robert Latimer, under whom he made such considerable progress that, before leaving school, he had produced a version of the Medea of Euripides in Latin Iambics. Hobbes's grammar-school days, therefore, extended from 1596 to 1602. His master, Latimer, was at this time a young man of nineteen or twenty, fresh from college. John Aubrey, the antiquary, who was born in the neighbourhood of Malmesbury thirty-seven years after Hobbes, was educated by the same teacher, who had, by this time, however, become rector of the adjoining parish of Leigh-de-la Mere. "I remember," says Aubrey, in his Life of Harvey, my old schoolmaster, Mr. Latimer, at seventy, wore a dudgeon, with a knife and bodkin, as also my old grandfather Lyte, and Alderman Whitson, of Bristow, which, I suppose, was the common fashion in their young days." In his Life of Hobbes, Aubrey further writes as follows: :- "This summer 1634, (I remember it was in venison season, July or August) Mr. T. H. [Thomas Hobbes] came into his native country to visit his friends, and amongst others he came to see his old schoolmaster, Mr. Robert Latimer, at Leighde-la-Mere, when I was then a little youth, at school in the church, newly entered into my grammar by him. Here was the first place and time that I ever had the honour to see this worthy learned man, who was then pleased to take notice of me, and the next day came and visited my relations. He was a proper man, brisk, and in very good equipage [equipment]; his hair was then quite black. He staid at Malmesbury and in the neighbourhood a week or better; 'twas the last time that ever he was in Wiltshire." Latimer, it appears, died in the beginning of November in this same year-so that Aubrey was one of his last scholars, as Hobbes had been one of