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PHYSICAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES. 195

astronomy and geometry, in the hope, as he expresslysays, of giving some stimulus and encouragement tothese studies, “ at present so generally neglected in theuniversity.” His own lectures were published in 1620,and comprise an elaborate commentary on Euclid. Henominated, as the first occupants of the chairs he hadinstituted, Bainbridge and Briggs. He died in 1621.

Briggs has been already mentioned as the friend ofNapier ; and perfected his invention by calculatinglogarithms on another system, better adapted to prac-tice ; the same, in fact, as that since generally adopted.He also published the first part of a work called “ Tri-gonometria Britannica.” He was one of the earlyprofessors in Gresham college , founded about this pe-riod by the eminent merchant of that name in Lon-don ; and which, for nearly a century, continued tobe adorned by some of the first philosophers of the day ;but has subsequently dwindled away into the formalrepetition of certain lectures, for which an audience ishardly ever collected. Briggs’s “ Arithmetica Loga-rithmica,” published in 1624, is remarkable for con-taining the first announcement of the law by which theco-efficients are formed in the involution of a binomialquantity to any integer power, which has since been somuch extended, and has acquired so much importance.The relation of these quantities, and a mode of form-ing them, had, indeed, been partially shown by Stiphe-lius and Cardan.

The Philosophy of Bacon.

The zeal and ability with which Galileo had carriedon his experimental enquiries ; the boldness with whichhe exposed the deficiencies of the philosophy of theschools ; the confidence with which he had appealed tothe evidence of experiment and observation; and, aboveall, the brilliant success which had crowned his efforts,and the universal reputation which he had so deservedlyo 2