Crabtree and bidding him watch and observe on the predicted day, mentions only one mutual friend, Foster, the Gresham lecturer in London, whom it would be well to inform of what was anticipated.

As the time drew nigh, Horrocks was all anxiety and expectation, and, to make assurance doubly sure, he began to watch on the forenoon of the 23d. His simple apparatus was a telescope adjusted to an aperture made in a darkened room, so that the image of the sun should fall perpendicularly on, and exactly fill, a circle of about six inches inscribed on a piece of paper, and divided into the usual 360 degrees. In his interesting little Latin tract, the Venus in sole visa, overflowing with a beautiful enthusiasm, a poetry and genuine devoutness, which give it a singular charm, Horrocks has described what was seen, or at least observed, by no eyes but his own and Crabtree's. From noon on the 23d, so long as the sun was above the horizon, he watched for four and twenty hours with only one, and that one a significant, intermission. In 1639, the twenty-fourth of November fell on a Sunday, and he describes himself as watching on that day "from sunrise to nine o'clock, and also from a little before ten until noon, and at one in the afternoon, being called away in the intervals to matters of greater importance, which for such secondary occupations it would have certainly been improper to neglect (aliis temporibus ad majora avocatus quæ utique ob hæc parerga negligi non decuit)." In point of fact the Rev. Jeremiah Horrocks had to perform morning and afternoon service to his simple and scanty flock in the modest church or chapel at Hoole; and, for once in his life, it may be suspected, he was a little-a very little-glad when both were over, and he could rush back to his darkened room, with its telescope and disc of paper. "At fifteen minutes past three in the afternoon, when I first had leisure again to renew my

observations, the clouds were entirely dispersed, and invited my willing self to make use of the opportunity afforded, it might seem by the interposition of heaven. When lo! I beheld a most delightful spectacle, the object of so many wishes a new spot of unusual magnitude, and of a perfectly circular shape, so completely entering the left limb of the sun that the limbs of the sun and the spot precisely coincided, forming an angle of contact. Not doubting that this was really the shadow of Venus I immediately set to work to observe it sedulously." The happy Horrocks was rewarded, and for half an hour, until the sun began to set, he made his unique and fruitful observations.

A year and a few months ran their course after this memorable scientific achievement, and the young Lancashire astronomer was no more. He had completed for publication his Venus in sole visa, and had accepted an invitation to pay a visit to Broughton and his friend Crabtree, who was to expect him on the 4th of January 1641, "if," he wrote, on the 19th of December, seemingly with a kind of presentiment, "nothing unusual should prevent" (nisi quod præter solitum impediat). Horrocks died "very suddenly," the mourning Crabtree recorded, how or of what disease is unknown, on the 3d of January 1641, the day before the expected meeting with his friend, in the 22d year of his age. The death of Crabtree, too, Wallis heard, took place not many days after that of Horrocks.

In the preceding summer Horrocks seems to have quitted the Hoole curacy. At any rate he had returned from Hoole to his native Toxteth, where he was still sojourning the month before his death, apparently in doubt as to what he was to do next, since he speaks in a letter to Crabtree of his "unsettled state" and even of "perpetual annoyances."

1 Venus in soie visa (in Hevelius), p. 115.

But

whatever his circumstances, and however gloomy his prospects, his love of science knew no abatement. During three months of his sojourn at Toxteth, he availed himself of his position near the estuary of the Mersey to observe the flux and reflux of the tides, detecting, he said, amid their general regularity, "variations and inequalities hitherto remarked by no one." He hoped, he wrote to Crabtree, if he remained there a whole year, " to make many discoveries, and of a kind demonstrating the motion of the earth."1

His Venus in sole visa remained in manuscript until 1660, when a copy of it came into the hands of the eminent Huygens, from whom it passed into those of the eminent Hevelius, and by him was published, to the joy of the scien tific world. Others of his "remains' were afterwards "redacted" by his former contemporary at Emmanuel, the mathematician Wallis, and were published in 1672-3 at the expense of the Royal Society. To the unscientific, Horrocks is known, if at all, as the first observer of a transit of Venus, but the scientific claim for him still higher honours of discovery and induction, and some of them aver that in the works of this Lancashire youth Newton's greatest achievements are foreshadowed, or even anticipated. "Amongst his discoveries "a mural tablet, in comparatively recent years erected to his memory in his own church at Hoole, records briefly, and not inaccurately-" are the nearest approximation to the sun's parallax, the correct theory of the moon, and the transit of Venus." Herschel calls him "the pride and boast of British astronomy;" and the foremost of European astronomers and historians of astronomy, from Halley to Airy, from Delambre to Whewell have delighted to do him honour. There are several references to Horrocks in the Principia. In one of them, after describing the moon's orbit as an ellipse about the earth, with its centre in the lower 1 Opera Posthuma, p. 337.

F

focus, Sir Isaac Newton assigns the first determination o the fact to Horrocks :- "Horoccius noster lunam in ellips circum terrum, in ejus umbilico inferiore constitutam, revolvi primus statuit.” 1 To have been thus signalised as a disco verer by Newton in the Principia is itself immortality. The praises of others can add little to the fame of Jeremiah Horrocks.

Lib. iii. prop. 35: scholium (London, 1726), p. 462,

Ο

V.

HUMPHREY CHETHAM.*

F this Lancashire Worthy no biography has yet been written proportionate in its merit to his own, or on a scale commensurate with the results of his beneficence. For more than two hundred years the Chetham Hospital and Library have been useful to Manchester, and conspicuous memorials of the pious munificence of their founder. Amid the multitudinous stir of money-getting, both are there to remind merchant and manufacturer that nearly the first Man-. chester trader of any note was also one of the most generous and thoughtful benefactors of the city where his fortune was made. His name has been rightly deemed the most fitting that could be assumed by the meritorious association which seeks to illustrate and elucidate the past of Lancashire. But among the numerous and elaborate publications of the Chetham Society a biography of Humphrey Chetham will be sought for in vain. The following slight account of him and of the element in which he moved, while it discharges an obvious duty, may help to remind that learned society

* W. R. Whatton's History of the Chetham Hospital and Library (London, 1834), being vol. iii. of Dr Hibbert Ware's History of the Foundations in Manchester; the late G. T. French's Bibliographical Notices of the Church Libraries at Turton and Gorton, bequeathed by Humphrey Chetham (Manchester, 1855), being vol. xxxviii. of the Chetham Society's publications; Fuller's Worthies (London, 1811); Aikin's Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round Manchester (London, 1795), p. 158; Raines's History of the Cotton Manufacture, &c., &c.