the East kirk of Edinburgh. In 1640 the town council of that city appointed him rector of the university, an office which he held till his death. When the covenanters took up arms in defence of their rights, Mr. Henderson was repeatedly appointed one of the commissioners to treat with the king. He was moderator of the general assembly in 1641, and again in 1643; and mainly contributed to effect the union between the Scottish covenanters and the English parliament. He was a leading member of the famous Westminster assembly, and spent three years in London aiding the cause of the covenant and the parliament. He was appointed in 1645 to assist the commissioners who were nominated by the two houses to negotiate with the king at Uxbridge. When Charles in the following year sought refuge in the Scottish camp, he sent for Mr. Henderson, who was his chaplain, and discussed with him in a series of papers the question of episcopal government, but without any result. Henderson, whose constitution was worn out with sickness, fatigue, and anxiety, resolved to return to Scotland. He reached Edinburgh on the 11th of August, 1646, and died on the 19th, in the sixty-third year of his age, and was buried in the Greyfriars churchyard. His enemies circulated a report that his death was hastened by remorse for the part he had taken against the king; and one of them even published a forged deathbed declaration containing an express renunciation of Henderson's presbyterian principles, and a glowing eulogium on King Charles. Henderson was a divine of great ability, learning, wisdom, and integrity, and a grave and eloquent speaker. Alexander Henderson was the author of three sermons and a considerable number of pamphlets on the questions of the day.—(See Aiton's Life and Times of Alexander Henderson, and Dr. M'Crie's Miscellaneous Works.)—J. T.
HENDERSON, Ebenezer, D.D., Ph.D., was born in the vicinity of Dunfermline, November 17, 1784. At an early age he was sent to learn a trade; and, after sundry trials in other branches, he ultimately settled to that of a shoemaker. Whilst thus engaged, he became a follower of the Haldanes, and having commended himself to their notice, he was received into the institution supported by Mr. Robert Haldane for the training of young men for the ministry. Here at length he found himself in a congenial sphere, and his progress in study was rapid and steady. Having chosen the department of foreign labour, he set sail from Leith for India by way of Denmark in 1805. Providentially detained in that country, he ultimately relinquished his purpose of visiting the East, and selected the north of Europe as the sphere of his evangelistic labours. Here the next twenty years of his life were spent principally as an agent of the Bible Society, in whose service he visited Sweden, Iceland, Lapland, the Danish provinces, Pomerania, and ultimately settled as their agent at St. Petersburg. Of his visit to Iceland he published a copious and instructive narrative, in two vols. 8vo, in 1818. In 1821 he, in company with his old and endeared friend Dr. Paterson, made an extensive tour in Southern Russia, the Crimea, and penetrated as far as Tiflis; of this he published an account under the title of "Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia," 1 vol. 8vo. This appeared in 1826, by which time he had settled in London as tutor of the Mission college, Hoxton. From this he removed to take the chair of theology in the Dissenting college of Highbury, in which honourable and useful sphere he continued till the college was merged in New college in 1850. Here his time was divided between his professional duties and literary labours. He delivered the congregational lecture in 1835, taking for his theme the question of inspiration, and besides other works he brought out a series of learned commentaries, with translations of the text from the original, on the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the minor prophets. These are of unequal merit, the best being those on Isaiah and the minor prophets; but they all indicate great scholarship and exegetical skill, and as yet have found no rivals in the department of Old Testament interpretation among works of British authorship. On retiring from the professor's chair, he laboured for some time us pastor of a small congregation at Mortlake. One of his last labours was the carrying through the press an edition of the Turkish New Testament for the Bible Society. He was perhaps the first oriental scholar of his day in Britain, so far as the Shemitic dialects were concerned; and his knowledge of other languages, both European and Eastern, was very extensive. The esteem in which he was held for his learning, was attested by his receiving the honorary degree of Ph.D. from the university of Kiel in 1816, and that of D.D. simultaneously from Amherst college and the university of Copenhagen in 1840. A childlike simplicity, combined with an unfailing cheerfulness and an undeviating courtesy, characterized his manners; while the lustre of a pure and vital piety diffused itself over his whole life and bearing. He died May 16, 1858.—W. L. A.
HENDERSON, John, a man of extraordinary learning, and sometimes called the "Irish Creichton," was born at Ballygarause in the county of Limerick on the 27th March, 1757. So precocious were his acquirements that he was a teacher of Latin at Kingswood, Gloucestershire, in his eighth year. From that he passed as a teacher successively to South Wales and Hanham, near Bristol. Medicine became a favourite study, though he was more conversant with the ancient than the modern schools. He was also an enthusiast in alchemy and magic, and profoundly versed in the science of physiognomy. Henderson was a student of Pembroke college, Oxford, where he took his degree of bachelor of arts. He is said to have been a profound and critical classical scholar. He died at Oxford in 1788. He left nothing after him but some poems and essays.—J. F. W.
HENDERSON, Thomas, a British astronomer, was born at Dundee on the 28th of December, 1798. He received his education at the grammar-school, and at the academy of his native place. With a view to his entering the legal profession, he was articled to a "writer," or solicitor, in Dundee. In 1819 he obtained an appointment in Edinburgh in the office of a writer to the signet, and became successively clerk to John Clerk, Lord Eldin, secretary to the earl of Lauderdale, and secretary to Francis Jeffrey, then lord-advocate of Scotland. This was his last legal appointment, which he relinquished in 1831, to devote himself entirely to astronomy. That science had been from early youth his favourite study during all the intervals of leisure left him by his legal business; and he had been encouraged to its cultivation during his residence in Edinburgh by Leslie and Wallace, and during occasional visits to London by Thomas Young. Wallace at that time was director of the observatory of Edinburgh, then the property of a private society, and Henderson frequently acted as his voluntary assistant. He first became known as an astronomer in 1824, by an improved method of reducing observations of occultations of stars by the moon, which he communicated to Young, then secretary to the board of longitude, and for which he received the thanks of that board. He detected and rectified an error in the calculations of the difference of longitude of the observatories of Paris and Greenwich, which had previously perplexed astronomers. (See Phil. Trans., 1827.) By these and various other useful labours towards the perfecting of the practical details of astronomical observation and calculation, he established so high a character for skill and accuracy, that on the death of Dr. Young in 1829, that great man was found to have left a note addressed to the lords of the admiralty, in which he recommended Henderson as the fittest person to succeed him in the superintendence of the Nautical Almanac. That appointment, however, was given to Mr. Pond, then astronomer-royal; and Henderson did not finally embrace astronomy as a profession until 1831, when he was appointed to the direction of the royal observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. He arrived there in April, 1832, and in the course of little more than a year made a most remarkable and important series of observations, fraught with results of the highest value to astronomy. As a single example of those results may be selected the determination of the annual parallax, and thence of the distance, of the nearest of the fixed stars, α Centauri, from our solar system. The parallax of that double star proved to be very nearly one second of angle, and its distance, consequently, from our system about two hundred thousand times the distance of the earth from the sun. This, being the first instance in which the parallax of a fixed star had been accurately found, was one of the most memorable achievements of astronomy. In 1833 Henderson was compelled, by ill health, to resign his appointment at the Cape and return to Britain, where he employed himself in reducing his observations, a process not less laborious than that of observing. In 1834 the observatory of Edinburgh was purchased by the government; and Henderson was appointed to the charge of it, with the titles of astronomer-royal for Scotland, and professor of practical astronomy in the university of Edinburgh. These appointments he held during the remainder of his life, accumulating and reducing a vast store of valuable observations, and evincing rare
