532 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1721. 



conspicuously, of about 2°' diameter, and about the same altitude with the sun : 

 and from it, towards the sun, there seemed to proceed a long white tail, muc 

 narrower than the mock-sun, but which I took to be a segment of the white 

 circle which I once saw entire in London. Had the air been clear, I doubt not 

 but much more of the phaenomena of the Parhelia might this time have been 

 observed : and I hope, that from our neighbourhood some member of the 

 Society may furnish us with a fuller relation. But how to explain these appear- 

 ances, and account for the magnitude of these circles, is what seems still 

 wanting. 



An Account of two Mock-Suns, and an Arc of a Rainbow inverted, with a Halo, 

 and its brightest Arc, seen at Lyndon in Rutland. By the Rev. Mr. IVilliam 

 fVhiston,* N° 369, p. 212. 



About 10 o'clock in the morning, on Sunday, Oct. 22, 1721, being at 

 Lyndon in the county of Rutland, after an aurora borealis the night before, wind 



* Mr. Whiston was a very learned, but eccentric divine, and a celebrated mathematician. He 

 was bom \667 , at Norton in Leicestershire, where his father was rector. About \6%6 he was 

 entered at Clarehall, Cambridge j and in 1()93 he became master of arts, and fellow of this college, 

 and shortly after commenced one of the tutors, an employment he was soon obliged to relinquish, 

 on account of ill health. In l694 having taken orders. Dr. Moore, Bishop of Norwich, appointed 

 him his chaplain, and 4 years after gave him the living of LowestofF in Suffolk. While with Bishop 

 Moore he published his •' New Theory of the Earth, from its Original to the Consummation of all 

 Things j" an ingenious work which brought the author much reputation, though it was reftited by 

 Dr. John Keill. 



In 1700 he was appointed Sir I. Newton's deputy, and afterward his successor, as Lucasian pro- 

 fessor of mathematics : soon after which, his publications became very numerous, both in theology 

 and in mathematics. Among several other works, he published the first edition of Newton's 

 Universal Arithmetic, which had been left in the university, where the author had used it in his 

 lectures • but this publication being made without the author's wish or consent, it has been said that 

 Sir Isaac never forgave Mr. Whiston for doing it ; though by several publications on the Newtonian 

 philosophy, he was one of the first who rendered those principles popular and intelligible to general 

 readers. But some of his theological writings favouring the Arian principles, he was deprived of 

 his professorship, and expelled from the university in 1710. These measures however did not abate 

 his zeal : he retired to London, where he continued such publications as zealously as ever. Here 

 he long struggled against adversities, sometimes reading lectures in philosophy, astronomy, and even 

 divinity, and receiving occasional benevolences, by pecuniary subscriptions among his friends, till his 

 death, which happened in 1732, at 84 years of age. 



Mr. Whiston's publications were very numerous, and mostly ingenious, the author having been 

 chiefly unfortunate and blamed for his imprudent though honest zeal. In 1714 he and Mr. Ditton 

 published their scheme for the longitude, which consisted in measuring distances by the velocity of 

 sound, and was so ludicrously stigmatized by Swifl. In 1720, he was proposed as a member to the 

 Royal Society, by Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Halley, but was rejected by means of the president 

 Sir \. Newton. The above paper is the only communication of his printed in the Philosophical 



