Logan, James

, a polite scholar, and magistrate of some eminence in America, was born in Scotland about 1674. He was one of the people called Quakers, and accompanied William Penn in his last voyage to Pennsylvania. For many years of his life he was employed in public business, and rose to the offices of chief justice and governor of the province: but he felt always an ardour of study, and by husbanding his leisure hours, found time to write several treatises in Latin, of which one on the generation of plants, was translated into English by Dr. Fothergill. When advanced in years, he withdrew from the tumult of public business to the solitude of his country-seat, near Germantown, where he corresponded with the most distinguished literary characters of Europe. He also made a version of “Cicero de Senectute,” which was published with notes by the celebrated Dr. Franklin. Mr. Logan died in 1751, at the age of seventy-seven, leaving his library, which he had been fifty years in collecting, to the people of Pennsylvania. The following extract from his will affords a pleasing idea of his literary enthusiasm: " In my library, which I have left to the city of |

Philadelphia, for the advancement and facilitating of classical learning, are above an hundred volumes of authors in folio, all in Greek, with mostly their versions. All the Roman classics without exception. All the whole Greek mathematicians, viz. Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy, both his Geography, and Almagest, which I had in Greek (with Theon’s commentary in folio, above 700 pages) from my learned friend Fabricius, who published 14 volumes of his ‘ Bibliotheque Grecque,’ in 4to, in which, after he had finished his account of Ptolemy, on my inquiring of him

at Hamburgh in * how I should find it, having long

sought for it in vain in England; he sent it me out of his own library, telling me it was so scarce, that neither prayers nor price could purchase it. Besides there are many of the most valuable Latin authors, and a great number of modern mathematicians, with all the three editions of Newton, Dr. Wall is, Halley, &C." ¹