body." The Commissioners thereupon declined further dealing with him.

The reason of the above absurd conduct we suspect to have been, that Harrison desired, in addition to the large reward claimed by him, to have a monopoly of the manufacture of his watches, such as would have necessarily been created for his benefit, had he been allowed to keep his actual methods of working a secret. For he offered, upon receiving the reward, "to employ a sufficient number of hands, so as with all possible speed to furnish his Majesty's navy, &c. &c., not doubting but the public will consider the charge of the outset of the undertaking." We.quote here from the Biographia Britannica, in the last volume of which, published in 1766, is an account of him, from materials avowedly furnished by himself, and plainly written by a partisan. It is the only instance we can find in which a memoir of a living person has been inserted in that work.

The next circumstance we find, (for there is no connected history of this discussion, which exists only in a number of detached pamphlets,) is the delivery of the watch to Dr. Maskelyne, at the Royal Observatory, in May, 1766, that its rate of going might there be tried. The Report of the Astronomer Royal states, that it could not be depended upon within a degree of longitude in a voyage of six weeks; and a very angry pamphlet, published by Harrison in the following year, accuses Maskelyne of having treated the instrument unfairly. Many circumstances are stated which now appear ludicrous, and some which, if true, would have reflected discredit on the Commissioners. But nothing can be inferred, after the refusal of Harrison to accede to the very reasonable demand of the Commissioners, except that he was most probably as wrong in his suspicions as he had been foolish in his dealings. The end of

this dispute was, that in 1767 Harrison complied with the conditions insisted upon; and, it having been found that his improvements were such as admitted of execution by another person, he received the whole sum awarded to him by the Act of Parliament.

Harrison was not a well-educated man, and was deficient in the power of expressing his meaning clearly. It was easier for him, no doubt, to make two watches than to explain one; and hence, perhaps, his aversion to men of theory," who troubled him for descriptions and explanations.

He died in 1776, at his house in Red Lion Square, having been engaged during the latter years of his life in bringing his improvements still nearer to perfection. His last work, which was tried in 1772, was found to have erred only four seconds and a half in ten weeks.

In his younger days, some church-bells, which were out of tune, set him upon examining the musical scale, with a view to correct them. He communicated his ideas on the subject to Dr. Smith, who confirmed and extended them in his well-known work on Harmonics. In the Preface it is stated that Harrison made the interval of the major-third bear to that of the octave the proportion of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. This, he said, he did on the authority of a friend, who assured him it would give the best scale. Harrison himself wrote a treatise on the scale, but we do not know whether it was published.

He is, on the whole, a fine instance of the union of originality with perseverance. The inventions, of which it takes so short a space to tell the history, were the work of fifty years of labour, and to them the art of constructing chronometers, and consequently the science of navigation, is indebted for much of its present advanced state.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, the son of a watch-maker at Geneva, was born June 28, 1712. His mother dying while he was yet a child, his father took a second wife; and he himself was placed at school at the village of Bossey, near Geneva, where he learnt but little, and was afterwards apprenticed to an engraver, a coarse, brutal man, whose treatment of him tended to sour a temper already wilful and morose. He became addicted to idleness, pilfering, and lying. The fear of punishment for some act of especial misconduct induced him to run away from his master, and he wandered into Savoy, where finding himself totally destitute, he applied to the Bishop of Annecy, on the plea of wishing to be instructed in the Catholic religion. The bishop recommended him to Madame de Warens, a Swiss lady, herself a

convert to Catholicism, who lived at Annecy. She received the boy kindly, relieved his present wants, and afforded him the means of proceeding to Turin, where he entered the College of Catechumens, and after going through a preparatory course of instruction, abjured the reformed religion, and became a Catholic. But as he refused to enter into holy orders, on leaving the college he was again thrown upon his own resources. He became a domestic servant; but his want of self-control and discretion rendered him very unfit for his employment; and in 1730 he returned to the house of Madame de Warens, who received him kindly, and afforded him support and protection during the next ten years. Of his foolish, profligate, and ungrateful course of life during this period, we have neither space nor wish to give an account: after many absences, and many returns, Rousseau quitted her finally in 1740, receiving letters of introduction to some persons at Lyons. Tutor, musician, and private secretary to the French Ambassador, his restless temper and versatile mind led him successively from Lyons to Paris and Venice. From the last-named city he returned to Paris in 1745; and alighting at an obscure inn, met with a servant girl, Therese Levasseur, with whom he formed a connexion which lasted all the rest of his life. He tried to compose music for the stage, but did not succeed in his attempts. He was next employed as a clerk in the office of M. Dupin, Fermier-général, but did not remain long in his new employment. In 1748 he became acquainted with Madame d'Epinay, who proved afterwards one of his steadiest and kindest friends. He frequented the society also of D'Alembert, Diderot, and Condillac, and he was engaged to write the articles on music for the Encyclopédie, which he did very ill, as he himself acknowledges. One day he saw by chance

in an advertisement that a prize had been offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the question, Whether the progress of sciences and of the arts has been favourable to the morals of mankind? He at once resolved to write for the prize, and apparently without having ever before considered the subject, made up his mind to take the negative side of the question. Diderot encouraged, but did not, as has been commonly said, originate this determination. He supported his position, that science, literature, and art, have been fatal to the virtues and happiness of mankind, with a glowing eloquence ; and the Academy awarded him the prize. His success confirmed him in a turn for paradox and exaggeration; and he seems to have adopted, as a general principle, the doctrine that the extreme opposite to wrong must necessarily be right. At the same time his reputation as an author became established, and in a few years after his first essay he was acknowledged to be one of the most, or rather the most, eloquent writer among his contemporaries. Meantime he persevered in his attempts at musical composition, and wrote Le Devin du Village,' an opera which was played before the king at the Court Theatre of Fontainebleau, and met with the royal approbation. Rousseau was in one of the boxes with a gentleman belonging to the court. The king having expressed a desire to see the composer of the opera, Rousseau became alarmed or ashamed at the slovenly condition of his dress, and instead of repairing to the royal presence, he ran out of the house and hastened back to Paris. Naturally shy, he possessed neither ease of manners nor facility of address, and he could never throughout life subdue his own acute feeling of these deficiencies; a feeling which of course tended to perpetuate and increase his awkwardness. This was