i88o.] 
Edmund Halley. 
99 
Prince (subsequently our King George I.) and his sister the 
Queen of Prussia, and at Vienna he was personally presented 
to the Emperor Leopold. 
In 1703 Capt. Halley returned to his native country, and 
was made Professor of Geometry in the University of Oxford, 
in the place of Dr. Wallis, and the degree of LL.D. was 
also conferred upon him. The professorship of Astronomy at 
the University of Oxford was withheld from him, it is said, 
at the instigation of the orthodox Stillingfleet— another in- 
stance of the numerous attempts to stifle true scientific 
investigation by narrow-minded and bigoted divines. 
The late Captain, now Dodtor Halley, as indefatigable as 
ever, did not seek in his professorial chair the otium cum 
dignitate : only forty-seven years of age, he began to trans- 
late into Latin, from the Arabic, “ Apollonius de Sedtione 
Rationis,” and to restore the two books “ De Sedlione 
Spatii” of the same author (which are lost), from the account 
given of them by Pappus ; and he published the whole work 
in 1706. Afterwards he took a leading part in preparing for 
the press and editing “ Apollonius’ Conics,” and he success- 
fully supplied the whole of the eighth book, the original of 
which is lost. He likewise added Serenus on the Sedlion of 
the Cylinder and Cone, printed from the original Greek, 
with a Latin translation, and published the whole in folio. 
In 1713 he was made Secretary of the Royal Society, and 
on May 3rd, 1715, with the astronomer De Louville, he made 
his observations of the celebrated total solar eclipse from 
the house of the Royal Society, in Crane Court, Fleet Street, 
which he has so well recorded in the “ Philosophical Trans- 
actions ” of the Society. 
In 1720 he was appointed Astronomer Royal at Green- 
wich, in room of his old friend and colleague Flamsteed , 
and nine years afterwards had the distinction of being chosen 
as a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences at Paris. 
Full of years and honours this great man died at Green- 
wich, in his eighty-seventh year, after a long career of such 
scientific benefits to his countrymen as few of our greatest 
philosophic worthies can boast. Besides his magnetic works 
and astronomical discoveries — among which was the disco- 
very of the acceleration of the moon’s mean motion, and 
the method of finding longitude at sea— his principal works 
were the “Tabula Astronomicse ,’ and an “ Abridgment of 
the Astronomy of Comets,” in addition to his “ Catalogus 
stellarum Australium ” before mentioned. We are also in- 
debted to him for the publication of several of the works of 
Sir Isaac Newton, who had a particular friendship for him, 
