wards cheated. Upon the remainder (my Ring trade being understood and lost) I set up, with the remainder of 2 cakes of Bees-wax sent mee in reliefe of my calamity, upon the trade of playing cards, white starch, and hayre hatts, which I exchanged for tobacco pipes and the shreds of Letter and parchment, wherewith to size paper. By all which I gott my expences, followed by Colledge, proceeded in Mathematics, and cleer'd four pounds.'[1]
After leaving the college at Caen,[2] he entered the Royal Navy, having obtained at Caen, according to his own account, 'the Latin, Greek, and French tongues; the whole body of common arithmetic, the practical geometry and astronomy; conducing to navigation, dialling, &c.; with the knowledge of several mathematical trades; all which and having been at the University of Caen, preferred me to the King's Navy, where at the age of 20 years,' he says, 'I had gotten about three-score pounds, with as much mathematics as any of my age was known to have had.'
At the outbreak of the Civil War, feeling no taste for military adventures, and probably sharing the hostility of the West of England clothiers to the Cavaliers, he retired to the Continent. Before his return, there had elapsed three years spent by him almost entirely in France and the Netherlands. He frequented the schools at Utrecht, Leyden, and Amsterdam, and the School of Anatomy in Paris. In that capital, with the help of some English letters of introduction from Dr. Pell, the mathematician, he made the acquaintance of Hobbes, like himself a refugee from civil strife. The great philosopher at once recognised his ability and admitted him to familiar intercourse. Hobbes was at the moment engaged in the preparation of a treatise on optics. Aubrey says 'that they read
- ↑ July 14, 1686, to Sir R. Southwell.
- ↑ In several of the published copies of his will, e.g. in that contained in the Petty Tracts, published by Boulter Grierson, Dublin, 1769, and reprinted in Lodge's Peerage, 'Caen' is printed 'Oxford.' The original of the will is in the Registry of the Probate Court, Dublin. There is a copy at British Museum.
