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, son of the preceding, and nephew to the inventor of the reflecting telescope, was born June 21, 1661, at Aberdeen; where he also received the first grounds of his learning, but was afterwards removed to Edinburgh, and took his degree of M. A. in that university. The great advantage of his uncle’s papers induced his friends to recommend the mathematics to him; and he had a natural subtilty of genius particularly fitted for that study, to which he applied with indefatigable industry, and succeeded so well that he was advanced to the mathematical chair, at Edinburgh, at the age of twenty-three. The same year he published a treatise, entitled “Exercitatio Geometrica de dimensione figurarum,” Edinb. 1684, 4to, in which assuming the doctrine of indivisibility, and the arithmetic of infinites, as already known, he explained a method which not only suited his uncle’s examples, left by him without any way of finding them, but discovered others, by which an infinite number of curve-lines, and the areas contained between them and right lines (such as no other method then known extended to) might be measured. He already seen some bints in his uncle’s papers concerning sir Isaac Newton’s method, of which he made the best use he could *; and the advantage he found thereby raised an ardent desire in him to see that method published. Under this impatient expectation, the “Principia” was no sooner out in 1687, but our author took it in hand, and presently made himself so much master of it as to be able to read his professorial lectures upon the philosophy contained in it, and, causing his scholars to perform their exercises for their degrees upon several branches of it, became its first introducer into the schools.