Divine, Mathematician, and Philosopher, mean that he was possessed of an universal curiosity to find things out, or was simply a man curious in mind and character, in an universal way, Evelyn does not explain.
Wilkins himself, whom nobody reads now, was quite a voluminous writer, who attempted, in one book, to prove that the moon may be habitable, and who, in another work, undertook to show how the moon might be reached; thus antedating M. Jules Verne by more than three centuries. Unfortunately he did not turn his attention to Mars or to its people. He was a brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell.
It seems to be an established fact that before the Royal Society was born Wilkins had changed his abode from "over the Gateway"—now the Tower Library—to the rooms in the northwest corner of the West Quadrangle, which the Warden of Wadham still occupies.
John Wilkins was graduated from Magdalen Hall in 1631, and he became Warden of Wadham in 1648. Wood thought that there was nothing deficient in Wilkins, but a constant mind and settled principles.
It is comparatively easy, from the alliteration, to remember that the head of Wadham is Warden, especially when his name is Wilkins; but Pern-
