of sixteen children, nine of whom survived him. In the course of his antiquarian and historical researches Wodrow had formed an extensive and valuable collection of MSS., chiefly relating to ecclesiastical affairs in Scotland. A portion of these MSS. was purchased by the general assembly in 1742. Fifty years later the "Biographical Collections" were acquired by the university of Glasgow, and a great part of Wodrow's other MSS. and printed tracts were sold to the Faculty of Advocates. This same learned body also secured in 1828 his "Analecta," a kind of note-book or diary in six volumes, a collection of his own letters from March, 1709, to December, 1731, and a series of three thousand eight hundred and eighty letters addressed to the historian by his friends, between 1694 and 1733.—J. T.
WOELLNER, Johann Christoph, was born in 1732 at Doeberitz, studied theology at Halle, and in 1755 was appointed to the curacy of Gross-Behnitz, near Berlin. Having contracted a marriage with the widow of a general without the formalities required by law, he resigned his position in the church. He was engaged to give lessons on political economy to the hereditary prince of Prussia, nephew of Frederick the Great; and when this prince succeeded to the throne (1786), he was ennobled and promoted. In 1788 he was named minister of state and of justice, and chief minister of ecclesiastical affairs. Woellner had been some time previously affiliated to the sect of the Rosicrucians, but what effect the mysterious doctrines of this body may have had on his policy remains doubtful. It is certain that the whole aim of his administration was to confine the clergy within the limits of the most rigid orthodoxy, and to crush the freedom of speculation which had arisen under the tolerant rule of Frederick the Great. Frederick William II. troubled himself little with these matters; but his successor, Frederick William III., removed him from office. He died in 1800.—F. M. W.
WOIDE, Charles Godfrey, D.D , was born somewhere on the Polish frontier of Germany in 1725, and was educated at the universities of Frankfort-on-the-Oder and Leyden. He was for some time a pastor at Lissa, and in 1770 came over to this country to fill the place of preacher in the German chapel royal, St. James'. He was afterwards made reader also of the chapel, and having evinced his rare learning by two publications on the Coptic and Sahidic languages, which he edited in 1775 and 1778, he obtained the appointment in 1782 of assistant librarian in the British museum. In this office he executed the work by which he is best known, and which was an undertaking of great labour and signal use, viz., a facsimile edition of the Alexandrine Codex of the New Testament, with a Latin preface, which was afterwards published separately under the title of "Notitia Codicis Alexandrini cum variis ejus lectionibus." The work appeared in 1786, folio. He transcribed the Codex with his own hand, collated his transcription twice with the original, and exhibited the various readings contained in the Vatican and other manuscripts, as these had been collated for the use of Dr. Bentley, but which Bentley never published, though he had once intended to do so. The useful example set by Woide has since been largely followed by other text critics, and biblical scholars have now access in facsimile editions to all the most ancient and precious MSS. of the New Testament.—P. L.
WOLCOTT, John, better known by his poetical pseudonym of "Peter Pindar," was born at Dodbrooke in Devonshire, where his father was a small freeholder. The precise date of his birth is uncertain, but it seems that he was christened on the 9th of May, 1738. After a course of schooling in various places, diversified by a year's residence in Normandy, he removed to Fowey in Cornwall, where a kind uncle, a medical man, who had already defrayed the expenses of his education, adopted him as his heir, and brought him up to his own profession. At this time he showed some talent for serious verse, and was a fair draughtsman. He was anxious to see the world, and at his request his uncle persuaded Sir William Trelawney, appointed governor of Jamaica, to take Wolcott with him. On his arrival in Jamaica he practised medicine, and—strange episode in the history of such a man—he actually went to England, and was ordained by the bishop of London, that he might accept a cure of souls in Jamaica. The duties of his new charge, were, of course, but indifferently performed, and after the death of the governor of Jamaica, Wolcott returned to England. At home he was welcomed by his uncle, who died soon afterwards, and left him £2000. After various ineffectual attempts to obtain a medical practice in Cornwall, patronizing and bringing out by the way the talents of Opie the artist, Wolcott removed to London. In 1782 he began his career as a satirical poet by some "Lyrical Odes" on the Royal Academy exhibition, under the afterwards famous pseudonym of Peter Pindar. It was the first of a long, a very long, series of attacks on established authorities, political, literary, social, and artistic, which procured him an immense though questionable popularity. George III. was the particular object of his sarcasms, which, conveyed in a style often doggrel, but always popular and telling, made Peter Pindar for a time a power in the land. According to his own account, the Pitt ministry attempted to buy his silence by a pension of £300 a year, which he threw up when he found that active support more than passive neutrality was expected. In 1795 the popularity of his writings was so great, that an eminent firm of London publishers agreed to give him £250 a year for the copyright of his works. Like most temporary satires, Peter Pindar's numerous, or rather innumerable writings—he himself professed ignorance of their extent—are little read now, and are only occasionally consulted for their personal allusions. Wolcott, after suffering much from asthma, and having been for years quite blind, died in 1819. There is a copious memoir of him, with a tolerably complete list of his writings, in the Annual Biography and Obituary for 1820, written by a personal acquaintance, who describes him as "a thick, squat man," with "a face large, dark, and flat," and "manners neither elegant nor agreeable."—F. E.
WOLF or WOLFIUS, Christian, a celebrated German mathematician and philosopher, distinguished for his comprehensive attempts to elaborate the results of previous research through the application of mathematical methods to mental and moral science, was born at Breslau, the capital of Silesia, on the 24th January, 1679. His father was a respectable tradesman in Breslau, who trained his son Christian for the church, in the gymnasium and college, and afterwards in the divinity school of his native town. Christian Wolf was afterwards educated at Jena and Leipsic, taking his degree in philosophy at Leipsic in 1702. At an early period in his studies he was awakened to a sense of the injurious effects of the scholastic system and spirit then in vogue in the German universities, and animated by the hope of one day promoting a reform in philosophy. He showed in his early studies an extraordinary genius for mathematics. In these years also the "Medicina Mentis" of Tschirnhausen was his favourite companion; and this, along with his personal intercourse with the author, affected his whole intellectual course. The mind of Leibnitz, which was then moulding German thought, was foremost among the influences by which the mind of Wolf was educated. About 1703, having resolved to substitute academical for ecclesiastical life. Wolf settled at Leipsic to study and teach mathematics, principally with a view to prepare for the application of mathematical method to philosophy in all its departments. In order to obtain the privilege of reading lectures, he defended a dissertation which he had drawn up at Jena, entitled "De philosophia practica universali, methodo mathematica conscripta." The title illustrates the bent of his philosophical inclination, and the work attracted the attention of Leibnitz, then in the zenith of his fame. At Leipsic Wolf also lectured on logic, metaphysics, and natural philosophy, accumulating the material which was afterwards elaborated in his numerous philosophical works. In 1707, on the recommendation of Leibnitz, he became professor of mathematics and philosophy at Halle, and entered soon after on that course of voluminous authorship which spread his reputation over Germany and other countries. His "Aërometria," which appeared in 1709, displayed his ability in natural philosophy, and probably occasioned his being elected in the following year a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and soon after of the Royal Academy of Berlin. His "Elementa Matheseos universæ," and other works in the same science, soon followed. In 1712 he first appeared in a field of study with which his name is especially associated—as the author of a small manual of logic, in German, translated into English in 1770, in which he holds a middle course between scholastic subtilties and the loose suggestions of Ramus, Des Cartes, and other logicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A "Lexicon Mathematicum," meant to afford an explanation of technical terms in that science to those who had no opportunity of studying it in a regular manner; a "Compendium" of his elements of mathematics; a "Synopsis" of his philosophical lectures; and various contributions to the Acta Eruditorum, including a memoir of Leibnitz who died in 1716—were among the literary performances of the earlier part
