HARRIOT, or Harriott, Thomas (1560–1621), an English mathematician and astronomer, was born at Oxford in 1560. After studying at St Mary s Hall, Oxford, where he took his bachelor s degree in 1579, he became tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh, who in 1585 appointed him to the office of geographer to the second expedition to Virginia. Harriot published an account of this expedition in 1588, and the work was afterwards reprinted in Hakluyt s Voyages. On his return to England after an absence of two years, he resumed his mathematical studies with zeal and success ; and having made the acquaintance of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, distinguished for his patron age of men of science, he received from him a yearly pension of .120. He died at London 2d July 1621, after having suffered much from a cancer in the lip, occasioned it is supposed by a habit he had contracted of holding in his mouth instruments of brass often charged with verdigris. A manuscript of Harriot s entitled " Ephemeris Chrysome- tria" is preserved in Sion College; and his Artis Analy tics Praxis ad ^Equationes Algebraicas resolvendas was published at London in 1631. An account of his contribu tions to the science of algebra will be found in the article Algebra, vol. i. p. 514; and Wallis s History of Algebra (1685) may also be consulted. From some papers of Harriot s discovered in 1784 it would appear that he had either procured a telescope from Holland, or divined the construction of that instrument, and that he coincided in point of time with Galileo in discovering the spots on the sun s disk.
HARRIS, James (1709–1780), a distinguished English writer on the subject of grammar, was born at Salisbury on the 20th of July 1709. He received his early education at Salisbury, whence he was removed to Oxford at the age of sixteen ; arid, having passed the usual number of years as a gentleman commoner at Wadham College, he was entered at Lincoln s Inn as a student of law, though not intended for the bar. When he had attained his twenty- fourth year his father died ; and this event, having at once freed him from all control, and placed him in the possession of an independent fortune, enabled him to exchange the study of law for other pursuits more congenial to his taste. The decided bent of his mind had always been towards the Greek and Latin classics ; and to the study of these he now applied himself with unremitting assiduity during a period of fourteen or fifteen years. The first fruit of this length ened course of application was a volume which he published in 1744, containing three treatises one on art, another on music, painting, and poetry, and a third on happiness. In 1751 appeared the work by which he is best known, Hermes, a philosophical inquiry concerning universal grammar. Although Hermes had considerable reputation in its day as a treatise on grammar, it must now be re garded as antiquated, and even as erroneous in conception. It is not so much a work on grammar as an attempt to force upon grammatical forms a strictly logical significance, to discover the groundwork of all grammars by analysing the thoughts to be expressed in words. This method, as we now recognize, is incapable of throwing light upon the oral structure and growth of language and grammatical forms. In 1775 Harris published his Philosophical Arrangements, part of a larger work which he had medi tated, but did not complete, on the peripatetic logic. It is in fact a commentary on Aristotle s categories, and an attempt to discuss problems of more recent philosophy by the Aristotelian notions. The Philological Inquiries is a pleasantly written but slight work on the principles of literary criticism and style. It is the least pedantic of all his works. Harris died in December 1780. His works were collected and published in 2 vols., 1801, by his son, Lord Malmesbury, who prefixed a brief biography.
HARRIS, John, D.D. (c. 1667–1719), an English writer, best known as the editor of the Lexicon Technicum, which ranks as the earliest of the long line of English encyclopaedias, and as the compiler of the Collection of Voyages and Travels which passes under his name. He was educated at St John s College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1687, and proceeded M.A. in 1690. Having entered the church, he was soon presented to the rectory of Winchelsea in Sussex; and as early as 1698 he was in sufficient repute as a learned divine to be entrusted with the delivery of the seventh series of the Boyle lectures Atheistical Objections against the Being of God and His Attributes fairly consid ered and fully refuted. Between 1702 and 1704 we find him lecturing on mathematics on the foundation of Charles Cox, and advertizing himself as a mathematical tutor at Amen Corner. The friendship of Sir William Cowper, afterwards lord chancellor, soon after raised him to a much higher position. Besides receiving the office of private chaplain to Sir William, he was presented in 1708 with a prebend in Rochester Cathedral, and appointed to the rectory of the united parishes of St Mildred, Bread Street, and St Margaret Moses. In this position he showed himself an ardent supporter of the Government, and got into a bitter quarrel with the Rev. Charles Humphreys, who afterwards was chaplain to Dr Sach- everel. Harris was one of the early members of the Royal Society, and for a time acted as vice-president. Besides his contributions to the society s Transactions, and the two important works by which he is still remembered, he published a number of treatises on mathematics and occasional sermons: and at his death on September 7, 1719, he was busy completing an elaborate History of Kent, of which the first volume had just left the press. He is said to have died in poverty brought on by his own bad management of his affairs. There is only one good account of his life, that by Nichols in the Literary Anecdotes, vol. ix., and this even, owing to scarcity of materials, is strangely defective.
HARRIS, John (1802–1856), divine and theologian, was born at Ugborough in Devonshire, March 8, 1802. At the age of fifteen he joined the Independent Church, and began to preach to the rustics of the neighbourhood as a member of the Bristol Itinerant Society. After studying at the Independent college at Hoxton he was in 1827 ordained pastor of a small congregation at Epsom. There in 1836 he wrote his essay, Mammon, or Covetousness the Sin of the Christian Church, which won a prize of 100 guineas offered by Dr Conquest, and brought its author into notice, thirty thousand copies being sold within a few years. In 1838 he received the degree of doctor of divinity from Brown University, America, and was ap pointed president and professor of theology in Cheshunt college; and in 1850, when the Independent colleges at Highbury, Homerton, and Coward, near London, were united, Dr Harris was elected principal of the New College thus formed. He died December 21, 1856.
Besides Mammon, he wrote the Great Teacher (1835); two prize essays, Britannia (1837) and The Great Commission (1842); and Contributions to Theological Science. The Pre-Adamite Earth (1847), Man Primeval (1849), and Patriarchy (1855), form the beginning of a series, intended to illustrate the history of man from a theological point of view, but interrupted by his death.
guished electrician, was descended from an old family of Plymouth solicitors, and was born there 1st April 1791. He received his early education at the Plymouth grammar- school, and completed a course of medical studies at the university of Edinburgh, after which he established himself as a general medical practitioner in Plymouth. On his marriage in 1824 he resolved to abandon his profession on
account of its duties interfering too much with his favourite
