trenching, as too many of the poets of his time did, on the bounds of morality or religion. Posterity must forget his faults in his merits and his purity as a poet."—J. F. W.
WALLER, Sir William, a leading general of the parliamentary army in the first years of the English civil war of the seventeenth century, was born at Knolle in Kent in 1597. He was descended, like the poet of the same name, from the old Kentish family of the Wallers of Speldhurst. According to Anthony Wood, his father was "Thomas Waller, Knight, lieutenant or constable of Dover castle, and chief butler of England, as he is sometimes styled." After a residence at Oxford he went to Paris to complete his education, and served in the Thirty Years' war against the imperialists. After his return, with a military reputation, he was knighted in 1622. He was elected to the Long parliament as member for Andover, and became one of the leaders of the presbyterian opposition to the court. On the breaking out of the civil war his known military experience procured him high command in the parliament army, and such was the reputation he gained by his first successes that he was styled "William the Conqueror." Beaten, however, at Lansdowne Heath in July, 1643, and suffering successive defeats, he lost his troops by desertion, and was moreover involved in continual disputes with Essex, the nominal commander-in-chief of the parliament army. The Cromwellian party in parliament got rid both of Essex and Waller by the self-denying ordinance (April 3, 1645), and he retaliated by opposing in the house the claims of the army and the policy of its new leaders. He was one of the eleven members denounced by the army in June, 1647, and he was finally excluded from the house of commons by Pride's Purge in 1648. After this event he seems to have suffered imprisonment in England, and to have escaped to exile in Holland. In 1659 he was in England, and was arrested and kept for some weeks in custody for alleged participation in Sir George Booth's Cheshire insurrection. He was appointed a member of the council of state in February, 1660, and sat in the convention parliament. "What he got by his sufferings at the king's restoration," says Wood, "I know not; sure I am he was no loser." He died in 1688. He is known as the author of "Divine Meditations upon several occasions," a philosophico-religious work of some interest; and of a "Vindication" of himself, not published till 1793, which is of historical value for its narrative of events up to the time of Pride's Purge.—F. E.
WALLICH, Nathaniel, a celebrated Danish botanist, was born at Copenhagen on 28th January, 1786, and died in London on 28th April, 1854. He was educated for the medical profession, and prosecuted his botanical studies under Vahl. In 1807 he went to the East Indies, and was stationed at Serampore as surgeon. His zeal for botany attracted the attention of Dr. Roxburgh, the superintendent of the botanic garden at Calcutta; and after the seizure of Serampore by the British, Dr. Wallich was transferred to the Calcutta garden. He was appointed to a temporary charge in 1815, and his appointment was confirmed soon afterwards. He added greatly to the collection of plants in the garden, and zealously prosecuted botany in India. He visited Nepaul, and made extensive collections of dried plants, which were transmitted to Britain and distributed among the principal herbaria in London and elsewhere. An attack of fever compelled him to seek the benefit of a voyage to Penang, Singapore, and other parts of Malacca, where he continued his botanical studies. He published a Flora of Nepaul. He was appointed to visit the timber forests in the western provinces of India, and thus he much increased his store of specimens. The botanic garden under his zealous endeavours attained a high degree of eminence. In 1828 he returned to England with the great bulk of his collections, and with the permission of the East India Company he set about their distribution. He published his "Plantæ Asiaticæ rariores," in 3 vols. folio, containing three hundred beautifully executed coloured plates. He returned to India in 1833, and he soon after was placed at the head of a scientific mission to report upon the cultivation of tea in Assam. In 1843, on account of his failing health, he went to the Cape of Good Hope, but subsequently returned to Calcutta. In 1847 he returned finally to England. He published numerous papers and reports in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society, the Society of Arts, the Journal of Botany, and the Linnæan Transactions. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, and of all the most important societies in Europe, America, and the East.—His son, Dr. G. C. Wallich, is devoting attention to diatomaceæ.—J. H. B.
WALLINGFORD, ___, an English mechanic, who flourished in the fourteenth century, was the maker, in 1326, of the earliest clock on record which is known to have been regulated by a flywheel.—W. J. M. R.
WALLIS, John, D.D., an eminent English mathematician, scholar, and divine, was born at Ashford, Kent, on the 23rd November, 1616. Losing his father, who was rector of the parish, in 1622, the care of his education devolved upon his mother. He was put to school at Ashford, where he continued until the plague visited the place in 1625, when he was removed to Tenterden, where he was well-grounded in the technical part of grammar by Mr. James Movat, a Scotch schoolmaster. In 1630 he was sent to a grammar-school of great reputation kept by Mr. Martin Holbech at Felsted, Essex. During the two years he was there he made great progress in the classical languages, being accustomed to speak Latin as often as possible, but strangely enough he learnt nothing at all of arithmetic. His first knowledge of ciphering was derived during a fortnight's vacation in the Christmas of 1631, when he caught from a younger brother, who was receiving a "commercial" education, the simple rules of common arithmetic. "This," he writes, "was my first insight into mathematics, and all the teaching I had." Mathematics at that time were looked upon rather as mechanical than academical studies; as serving the purpose of traders, merchants, seamen, &c., but scarcely worthy the pursuit of scholars and gentlemen. Wallis pursued the path he had accidentally entered upon as a pleasing diversion in spare hours. About Christmas, 1632, he went to Cambridge, and entered Emanuel college. His active intellect was not satisfied with the study of metaphysics and philology. He applied himself to natural philosophy, plunged into speculations on physic and anatomy, and in a public disputation maintained the theory of the circulation of the blood, which had been given to the world by Harvey in 1628. His keen interest in what was called the New philosophy, or the Baconian philosophy, subsequently led to his participation in the formation of the Royal Society. Emanuel college admitting only one fellow from the county of Kent, Wallis, in default of a vacancy, was elected a fellow of Queen's. He took the M.A. degree in 1640, and was ordained the same year. For about twelve months he lived as chaplain in the house of Sir Richard Darley, then two years with Lady Vere, and in 1644 he was one of the secretaries to the assembly of divines at Westminster. He has given a brief account of the objects for which this assembly was convened, to show that it was presbyterian not in the sense of anti-episcopal, but in that of anti-independent. "Their agreement to the covenant," he says, "was before I was amongst them." In 1642, while staying at Lady Vere's, he was shown an intercepted letter in cipher, and was asked half jestingly whether he could make anything of it. By counting the number of characters in the letter, he discovered it was but a new alphabet, and with a couple of hours' study he deciphered the document. This success brought him many requests of a similar nature, until his sagacity and ingenuity were at times taxed to the utmost. In March, 1644-45, he married, and four years later, being appointed Savilian professor of geometry, he removed to Oxford. To a "Grammar of the English Tongue," written in Latin, which he published in 1653, he prefixed a treatise on speech, in which he considered philosophically the formation of articulate sounds by the human voice. From nice observation he was able to construct a system by which the organs of speech being placed in the right position, did, on the breath issuing from the lungs, form articulate sounds of speech in the case of deaf persons. Mr. Daniel Whalley, who had been deaf and dumb from a child, was in this way taught by Wallis to speak. In 1658 he was chosen keeper of the records in the university. He was a man of moderate principles, much occupied with learning, and although he objected to the extreme measures of Laud and others, and had consented to the Commonwealth government, he was not unwilling to promote the Restoration, which he did in some way that is not fully related, but to which he alludes in a letter written in 1685 to Dr. Fell, bishop of Oxford, for the express purpose of denying that he had deciphered the letters taken in King Charles' cabinet at the battle of Naseby. Charles II. at the Restoration confirmed Dr. Wallis, who complied with the act of uniformity, in all his offices, made him a royal chaplain, and a member of the commission appointed to revise the Book of Common Prayer. An account of his great achievements in mathematics, in which he proved to be the necessary precursor
