41 



EEBOLLEDO, BERNARDINO, COUNT OF. 



REDGRAVE, RICHARD, R.A. 



of tho author, was left in such an imperfect state that it was not 

 capable of publication. The six volumes which were completed include 

 all the winged insects, except the crickets (gryllus), grasshoppers, and 

 beetles. Tho first two volumes comprise the various kinds of cater- 

 pillars, with a description of their forms, mode of life, metamorphoses, 

 &c., as well as the different insects which attack them or live parasiti- 

 cally within them. The third volume includes the cloth-moths, aphides, 

 &c. The fourth embraces the gall-insects and the various two-winged 

 flies. The fifth contains the history of bees, and Reaumur made many 

 interesting discoveries concerning the habits of these curious insects, 

 which however have been greatly added to since by the labours of 

 Huber and others. The smaller communities of wasps, hornets, &c., 

 together with an account of the different kinds of solitary bees, occupy 

 the sixth and last volume, which is one of the most curious of the 

 whole. 



lu ; ;nnur formed a large collection of objects of natural history, of 

 which Brisson was the conservator, and the principal materials for that 

 naturalist's work on quadrupeds and birds were collected from it. 

 Many of Buffon's plates were also taken from objects in his museum, 

 which, after his death, went to the Cabinet du Roi. Reaumur passed 

 a quiet retired life, and his private history is unmarked by any import- 

 ant incident. He is said to have died from the effects of a fall which 

 he received while riding in the country. His death took place in 

 October 1757, in his seventy-fifth year, 

 (Life, by Cuvier, in Biog. Univ.) 



REBOLLE'DO, BERNARDINO, COUNT OF, a distinguished Spanish 

 officer and writer, was born of illustrious parents at Leon, the capital 

 of the province of that name, in 1597. In early youth he embraced 

 the profession of arms, and joined the Spanish army of Italy, where 

 he so much distinguished himself as to obtain, in 1622, the command 

 of a galley, with which he assisted in the taking of Port Maurice and the 

 castle of Ventimille from the Genoese. After this he served in the 

 army, and was present at the taking of Nice (1626), and the storming 

 of the fortress of Casal, where he was severely wounded. In 1632 he 

 commanded a considerable body of Spanish infantry in the Low 

 Countries. Having, in 1636, received orders from his government to 

 march to the assistance of the Emperor Ferdinand II., who was closely 

 pursued by the Swedes, he succeeded in extricating that monarch from 

 his perilous situation, and was by him rewarded with the title of 

 Count of the Germanic Empire and the government of the Low Pala- 

 tinate. At the conclusion of the war, Philip IV. appointed him 

 ambassador to the court of Denmark; and he rendered signal 

 service to the king of Denmark when Charles Gustavus marched his 

 army across the frozen sea and bombarded Copenhagen. Though a 

 zealous Roman Catholic, Rebolledo felt for the royal house of Denmark 

 a kind of personal devotion, which he seized every opportunity of 

 manifesting in his writings. He had early evinced some talent for 

 poetry, and he had whilst in Germany composed a sort of didactic 

 poem on the art of war and state policy, entitled ' Selvas Militares y 

 Politicas,' which he afterwards published at Copenhagen in 1652, 

 16mo. But it was not until his mission to that capital, that Rebolledo 

 found leisure to prosecute with assiduity his poetic studies. He 

 seems to have taken particular interest in the history and geography 

 of Denmark, a compendium of which he put into verse, which was 

 printed at Copenhagen, under the title of 'Selvas Danic;is,' 1665, 4to. 

 After a residence of several years at the court of Denmark, Rebolledo 

 was recalled to Madrid, where he was soon after appointed president 

 of the Board of War in the council of Castile. He died in 1676, in 

 the eightieth year of his age. Besides the two above-mentioned works, 

 Rebolledo wrote 1, ' La Constancia victoriosa y Trinos de Jeremias,' 

 Colonia (Copenhagen), 1665, 4to, being a paraphrase of the Book of 

 Job and the Lamentations of Jeremiah ; 2, ' Selvas Sagradas,' Ib., 

 1657, and Antwerp, 1661, 4to; 3, a play entitled ' Amor despreciando 

 Riesgos' ('Love dreads no Danger '), possesses considerable interest. 

 Rebolledo was particularly successful as a writer of madrigals, some of 

 which are so good as to remind the reader of the best times of Spanish 

 poetry, which in Rebolledo's time was fast on its decline. His lighter 

 poems appeared at Antwerp, 1660, 16mo, under tho title of 'Ocios,' 

 (Leisure Hours). An edition of Rebolledo's works was collected in 

 his lifetime, and appeared at Antwerp, 1660, in 3 vols. 4to. But the 

 best and most complete is that of Madrid, 1778, 4 vols. 4to. 



RECORDS, ROBERT, an eminent mathematician of the 16th cen- 

 tury, was the first native of Great Britain who introduced the study 

 of analytical science into this country. There is no memorial of the 

 exact time of his birth, though it must have been somewhere about 

 the year 1500. We know that he was a native of Tenby in Pembroke- 

 shire, that he entered himself a student at Oxford about the year 

 1525, where he publicly taught rhetoric, mathematics, music, and 

 anatomy, and that he was elected a fellow of AllSouls' College in 1531. 

 Making physic his profession, he repaired to Cambridge, and in 1545 

 he received the degree of M.D. from that university, and, says Wood, 

 was highly esteemed by all who knew him for his great knowledge in 

 several arts and sciences. He afterwards returned to Oxford, where, 

 as he had done previously to his visit to Cambridge, he publicly taught 

 arithmetic and other branches of the mathematics with great applause. 

 According to Fuller, he was of the Protestant religion. He afterwards 

 repaired to London, at which place he resided in 1547, and in that 

 year published a medical work entitled ' The Urinal of Physic,' which 



passed through several editions. He was also chosen physician to 

 Edward VI. and Queen Mary, to both of whom he dedicates some 

 of his works. With the knowledge of this latter fact, it is scarcely 

 possible to account for the circumstances in which he was at the time 

 of his decease, a prisoner in the King's Beech. He died in 1558, 

 probably soon after the date of his will (June 28), in which he styled 

 himself ' Robert Recorde, doctor of physicke, though sicke in body 

 yet whole of mynde.' This document is preserved in the Prerogative 

 Office, and furnishes some facts : to Arthur Hilton, under-marshal of 

 the King's Bench, his wife, and the other officers and prisoners, he 

 gave small sums amounting to 61. 16*. 8rf. ; to his servant John, 61. ; 

 to his mother, and his father-in-law, her husband, 20Z. ; to Richarde 

 Recorde, his brother, and Robert Recorde, his nephew, his goods and 

 chattels, out of which his debts and the expenses of his funeral were 

 to be discharged. This last item leads us to think that debt was not, as 

 commonly stated, the real reason for his imprisonment ; although, 

 indeed, the amount of property enumerated does not constitute a large 

 sum even for those days. In a codicil to his will, made on the 29th 

 of June, 1558, he gives directions that his law books should be sold to 

 Nicholas Adams, a fellow-prisoner, for 41. 



The works of Recorde are all written in dialogue between master 

 and scholar, in the rude English of the time. They are enumerated 

 by the author himself at the end of his work called ' The Castle of 

 Knowledge;' and there is reason to think that two of his works 

 mentioned in that place are irrecoverably lost, at least no trace of 

 either of them has yet been discovered in print or manuscript. One 

 of them appears to have been entitled ' The Gate of Knowledge,' and 

 the other ' The Treasure of Knowledge.' Recorde's most popular 

 work appeared as early as 1540, under the title of ' The Grounde of 

 Artes, teachinge the worke and practise of Arithmeticke, both in 

 whole numbers and fractions, after a more easier and exacter sort 

 than any lyke hathe hitherto been set forth.' We have taken this 

 title from the edition of 1573. ' The Grounde of Artes ' was dedicated 

 to Edward VI., and continued to be repeatedly reprinted until the 

 end of the 17th century, the latest edition we have seen being that 

 edited by Edward Hatton in the year 1699. This work contains 

 numeration, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, reduction, 

 progression, the golden rule, a treatise on reckoning by counters on a 

 principle much resembling that of the Chinese abacus, a system of 

 representing numbers by the hand like the alphabet of the deaf and 

 dumb, a repetition of all the rules for fractions, with the rules of 

 alligation, fellowship, and false position. On the last rule he remarks 

 that he was in the habit of astonishing his friends by proposing 

 difficult questions, and working the true result by taking the chance 

 answers of ' suche children or ydeotes as happened to be in the place.' 

 ' The Pathway to Knowledge,' a brief compendium of geometry, trans- 

 lated and abridged from .the Elements of Euclid, was published at 

 London in 1551. 



'The Castle of Knowledge' was published in 1556, dedicated in 

 English to Queen Mary, and in Latin to Cardinal Pole. This work 

 is written in the form of a dialogue between master and scholar on 

 astronomy, and from the preface we gather that Recorde had not 

 altogether abandoned astrology. It begins with an account of the 

 Ptolemaic system, and afterwards proceeds in an apparently concealed 

 passage to unfold the elements of the Coperuican system of the 

 universe. Recorde appears to have been one of the earliest persons 

 in this country who adopted the Copernican system, if not the earliest 

 person who introduced it among us. All that is cited from Euclid 

 and Proclus is in Greek and Latin, usually both. 



In the ' Whetstone of Witte,' which was published in 1557, Recorde 

 has amassed together the researches of foreign writers on the subject 

 of algebra, then in its infancy, and has also incorporated several 

 improvements of his own. In algebra we recognise Recorde as the 

 inventor of the sign of equality, and of the method of extracting the 

 square root of multinominal algebraic quantities. In perception of 

 general results connected with the fundamental notation of algebra 

 he shows himself superior to others, and even, we may say, to Vieta, 

 although of course immeasurably below the latter in the invention of 

 means of expression. All his writings considered together, Recorde 

 was an extraordinary genius; and it must be remembered be was a 

 lawyer, a physician, and a Saxonist, as well as the first mathematician 

 of his day. 



(Halliwell, The Connexion of Wales with the early Science of England, 

 8vo, 1840 ; and an article in the Companion to the British Almanac for 

 1837, by Prof. De Morgan.) 



* REDGRAVE, RICHARD, R.A., was born in London in 1804. 

 The son of a manufacturer, his youth was spent in the counting-house 

 of his father, his chief employment, he says (Letter in 'Art- Journal' 

 for February 1850) consisting " in making the designs and working 

 drawings for the men, and journeying into the country to measure and 

 direct the works in progress." The business became an unprosperous 

 one, and he was permitted by his father to follow his own preference 

 for art. He drew in the Elgin and Townley galleries at the British 

 Museum, and about 1826 entered as a student in the Royal Academy; 

 at the same time maintaining himself by teaching drawing. He had 

 exhibited many pictures the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' appearing, from the 

 catalogues, to be a favourite text-book before he met with what 

 he terms his " first success." This was the sale of a picture exhibited 



