ham thirty miles every Saturday. At last he succeeded in opening a very small bookseller's shop in Birmingham, and by degrees rose to affluence. One of the turning-points in his struggle was the opening of the first paper warehouse known in Birmingham, to which he was stimulated by his friend Robert Bage, the papermaker and novelist. His property was much damaged in the Birmingham riots of 1791; but he received compensation. He died in the September of 1815. He published several works of topographical history, poetry, and a domestic tour—among them a useful history of Birmingham. His best known work, however, is his autobiography—"The Life of William Hutton, stationer, of Birmingham, and the history of his family, written by himself." It was published by his daughter the year after his death, and was reprinted in 1841, with new notes by her, in Mr. Charles Knight's English Miscellanies. Hutton's simple and affecting narrative, interesting as a record of successful struggle, is also a curious picture of some sections of provincial life in England in the eighteenth century.—F. E.
HUXHAM, John, M.D., an eminent physician of the eighteenth century. Few materials for a life of Huxham exist. He was born in Halberton in Devonshire. Having a strong inclination for the profession of medicine, he went to Leyden, where he studied under the celebrated Boerhaave, and where he took out his degree. Upon his return to England he settled at Plymouth and became a most successful practitioner, acquiring a considerable fortune, and gaining by several admirable publications great fame and distinction. His principal work is his "Essay on Fevers," of which five editions were published during his life. The form of slow nervous fever, which he particularly described, is known by his name; and a favourite combination of cinchona and aromatics which he was in the habit of prescribing, is still known as Huxham's tincture of cinchona. He died at Plymouth in 1768 at an advanced age.—W. B—d.
HUYGENS, Christian, a celebrated mathematician and natural philosopher, was born at the Hague on the 14th April, 1629. His father. Christian Huygens, a poet and a mathematician, who died in 1687 at the age of ninety, had been counsellor and secretary to three successive princes of the house of Orange; and his eldest son, Constantine, accompanied William III. to England in that capacity. His second son. Christian, who exhibited at the age of thirteen a great taste for mechanics and mathematics, was sent to the university of Leyden to study law, and he prosecuted his mathematical studies under Schooten, the commentator of Descartes. After studying some time at the university of Breda, he went in 1649 to Denmark, in the suite of the count de Nassau. In 1651 he published, under the title of "Exetasis Quadraturæ Circuli," &c., a reply to Gregory St. Vincent's Opus Geometricum on that subject; and in the same year his "Theoremata de Quadraturæ Hyperboles," &c., and his work "De Circuli magnitudine Inventa." In 1656 he visited France, and took his degree of doctor of laws at the university of Angers. In 1657 he published his work on the calculation of probabilities, entitled "De Ratiociniis in ludo aleæ," and in 1659 his "Systema Saturninum," in which he gives an account of the discovery of the fourth satellite of Saturn, and of the singular ring with which that planet is surrounded. In 1661, when he visited England, he made known his method of grinding the lenses with long focus, with which he made his astronomical discoveries; and when he returned to England in 1663, he was one of the hundred members admitted to the Royal Society on the 20th of May. The reputation of Huygens was now such that he was invited by Colbert in 1663 to settle in France; and having accepted of the liberal offer, he took his place as a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1666. In 1673 he published his great work, "Horologium Oscillatorium," &c., in which he described his great discovery, made in 1656, of applying pendulums to clocks, and making them vibrate between cycloidal checks. About the same time he invented the spiral spring for regulating the balances of watches, a contrivance in which he was anticipated by Hooke, and to some extent by the Abbé Hautefeuille. His residence in France having become painful, owing to the edicts against the protestants, he resolved to resign the honours and emoluments which he there enjoyed; and anticipating the edict of Nantes, he returned in 1681 to Holland, where he continued the prosecution of his favourite studies. In his "Astroscopia Compendiaria," which appeared in 1684, he described his telescopes without tubes. In 1690 he published his treatise on gravity, in French, and afterwards under the title of "Tractatus de Gravitate," in which he accepted the Newtonian theory of gravitation. In the same year appeared his great work, entitled "Traité de la Lumiere," written in 1678, in which he adopted the theory of undulations, first suggested by Hooke, and explains by its means the complex phenomena of double refraction, as exhibited in Iceland spar. After completing his more profound researches, Huygens spent the evening of his days in the composition of his "Cosmotheoros (Theory of the universe), or conjectures respecting the celestial bodies and their inhabitants," addressed to his brother Constantine. This interesting work, which, besides being translated into German and Dutch, passed through two English and two French editions, was written at the age of sixty-five, a short time before he died; and so great was the interest which he felt in its publication, that on the approach of death he earnestly besought his brother to carry his wishes into effect. "He mentions," says Sir David Brewster in his More Worlds than One, "the great pleasure he had derived from the composition of it, and from the communication of his views to his friends. About to enter the world of the future, the philosopher who had added a new planet to our system, and discovered the most magnificent and incomprehensible of its structures, looked forward with a peculiar interest to a solution of the mysteries which it had been the business of his life to contemplate. He was anxious that his fellow-men should derive the same pleasure that he did from viewing the planets and the stars as the seat of intellectual life, and he left them his theory of the universe—a legacy worthy of his name." It is a curious fact, only recently discovered by Mr. Edleston (Correspondence of Cotes, p. 75), that the celebrated astronomer Flamstead recommended the "Cosmotheoros" to Dr. Plumer, archdeacon of Rochester, who was so pleased with it that he left by his will £1800 to found the Plumian professorship of astronomy and experimental philosophy at Cambridge. While the "Cosmotheoros" was in the hands of the printer, Huygens was attacked by an illness, of which he died on the 5th June, 1695, in the sixty-sixth year of his age. His papers were bequeathed to the library of the university of Leyden; and in 1703 appeared his "Opuscula Posthuma," containing his Dioptrica, his Commentaries on Glass-grinding, his Description of a Planetary Automaton, his treatise on Motion and the Centrifugal Force, and his treatise De Corona et Paraheliis, which was reprinted by Dr. Smith in his Optics. A complete edition of the works of Huygens was published in 1724 and 1728, in four vols. 4to—the two first at Leyden, entitled "Opera Varia," and the two last at Amsterdam, entitled "Opera Reliqua." These publications, however, did not exhaust the Huygenian manuscripts at Leyden. M. Uylenbrock, professor of physics and astronomy, published, so recently as 1833, the remaining correspondence of Huygens and others, under the title of Christiani Hugenii aliorumque seculi xvii. virorum celebrium exercitationes mathematicæ et philosophicæ, ex MSS in Bibl. Acad. Lugduno-Batavæ servatis. In the first volume of the work we have the correspondence between Huygens and Leibnitz, and in the second his correspondence with M. De Vaumesle, a gentleman of Normandy, with Facio Duiller, and with Hab. Huygens.—D. B.
HUYGENS, Constantine, lord of Zuylichem, a Dutch statesman and litterateur, and brother of the celebrated mathematician Christian Huygens, was born at the Hague in September, 1596, and died in March, 1687. He was for some time secretary to Frederic prince of Orange, and in the same capacity accompanied William III. to England. As an author he is chiefly remembered by his "Monumenta Desultoria," a collection of Latin poems, published at Leyden in 1644, and at the Hague in 1655. He seems to have been held in high esteem by his literary contemporaries, with many of whom he carried on a correspondence.
HUYGENS, Gomarus, a Romish ecclesiastic, who attained celebrity by his theological writings, was born at Liere, or Lyre, in Brabant in 1631. He taught philosophy at Louvain, and was president of the college of Pope Adrian VI. His principal works, which are in Latin, are "The Method of Remitting and Retaining Sins;" "Theses on Grace;" "Theological Conferences;" and a "Course of Divinity." He offended his ecclesiastical superiors by refusing to write against the four articles of the French clergy; and when proceedings were instituted against Father Quesnel, author of Moral Reflections, Huygens warmly espoused his cause. He died in October, 1702.
