theory of the motion of the moon, which notwithstanding his age, he pursued with enthusiastic ardor. In 1721 he began his observations, and for the space of eighteen years, scarcely ever missed taking a meridian view of the moon when the weather was favorable. He died at Greenwich in 1742, at the advanced age of eighty-six, having spent one of the most active and useful lives on record. His honors and titles were numerous, but no more than his multifarious occupations and achievements entitled him to. In all he exhibited the same promptness of resolve and incessant assiduity, willing to assist or be assisted; and never deigning it beneath him to confess when ignorant, nor to receive information from any quarter, however humble. Whether as Captain Halley, as secretary to the Royal Society, consulting engineer to the emperor of Germany, or astronomer-royal, he was the same ardent, prompt, and indefatigable laborer. His publications and papers were numerous; he gave important assistance to Dr. D. Gregory in the preparation of the conic sections of Appolonius; and to Halley are we also indebted for the publication of several of the works of Sir Isaac Newton, who had a particular friendship for him, and to whom he frequently communicated his discoveries.
FERGUSON.
We pass by several authors and observers who contributed during the
time of Hüygens and Halley, to the advancement of astronomy, to notice
the life of an individual whose career, while beneficial to the science under
review, furnishes an ever-memorable instance of the acquirement of knowledge
under the most pressing difficulties and obstructions. The most of
those to whom we have adverted were men in independent circumstances,
or at least so situated as to obtain at once a liberal education and the
patronage and support of the great and wealthy. James Ferguson, the
ingenious experimental philosopher, mechanist, and astronomer, to whom
we allude, had no such advantages. He was born in 1710, a few miles
from Keith, a village in Banffshire, in the north of Scotland. His parents
were of the poorest order, but honest and religious, and, by toilsome labor
in the cultivation of a few rented acres, contrived to rear to manhood a
large family of children. Of the manner in which James acquired the
rudiments of education, and how he struggled to rise from obscurity to
distinction, we have a most interesting account in a memoir by himself,
which we cannot do better than quote in an abridged form.
After mentioning how he learned to read with a very scanty aid from an old woman and his father, and that little more than three months' tuition at the grammar school of Keith was all the education he ever received, he thus proceeds:—'My taste for mechanics was soon developed; but as my father could not afford to maintain me while I was in pursuit only of these matters, and as I was rather too young and weak for hard labor, he put me out to a neighbor to keep sheep, which I continued to do for some years; and in that time I began to study the stars in the night. In the daytime I amused myself by making models of mills, spinning-wheels, and such other things as I happened to see. I then went to serve a considerable farmer in the neighborhood, whose name was James Glashan. I found him very kind and indulgent; but he soon observed, that in the evenings, when my work was over, I went into a field with a blanket about me, lay down
