interest she could for me among her acquaintance there. I thankfully accepted of her kind offer; and instead of giving me one year, she gave me two. I carried with me a letter of recommendation from Lord Pitsligo (a near neighbour of 'Squire Baird's) to Mr. John Alexander, a painter in Edinburgh; who allowed me to pass an hour every day at his house, for a month, to copy from his drawings; and said he would teach me to paint in oil-colours, if I would serve him seven years, and my friends would maintain me all that time: but this was too much for me to desire them to do; nor did I choose to serve so long. I was then recommended to other painters, but they would no nothing without money. So I was quite at a loss what to do.

In a few days after this, I received a letter of recommendation from my good friend 'Squire Baird to the Reverend Dr. Robert Keith at Edinburgh, to whom I gave an account of my bad success among the painters there. He told me, that if I would copy from nature, I might do without their assistance; as all the rules for drawing signified but very little when one came to draw from the life, and, by what he had seen of my drawings brought from the North, he judged I might succeed very well in drawing pictures from the life, in Indian ink, on vellum. He then sat to me for his own picture, and sent me with it and a letter of recommendation to the Right Honourable Lady Jane Douglas, who lived with her mother,

the Marchioness of Douglas, at Merchiston-house, ncar Edinburgh. Both the Marchioness and Lady Jane behaved to me in the most friendly manner, on Dr. Keith's account, and sat for their pictures; telling me at the same time, that I was in the very room in which Lord Napier invented and computed the Logarithms; and that, if I thought it would inspire me, I should always have the same room whenever I came to Merchiston. -I staid there several days, and drew several pictures of Lady Jane; of whom it was hard to say, whether the greatness of her beauty, or the goodness of her temper and dispositions, was the most predominant. She sent these pictures to ladies of her acquaintance, in order to recommend me to them; by which means I soon had as much business as Icould possibly manage, so as not only to put a good deal of money into my own pocket, but also to spare what was sufficient to help to supply my father and mother in their old age.-Thus a business was providentially put into my hands, which I followed for six and twenty years.

Lady Dipple, being a woman of the strictest piety, kept a watchful eye over me at first, and made me give her an exact account at night of what families I had been in throughout the day, and of the money

I had received. She took the money each, night, desiring I would keep an account of what I had put into her hands; telling me that I should duly have out of it what I wanted for clothes, and to sent to my father.—But, in less

a

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than half a year, she told me that she would thenceforth trust me with being my own banker; for she had made a good deal of private enquiry how I had behaved when I was out of her sight through the day, and was satisfied with my conduct.

During my two years' stay at Edinburgh, I somebow took a violent inclination to study anatomy, surgery, and physic, all from reading on books, and conversing with gentlemen, on these subjects; whích, for that time, put all thoughts o. astronomy out of my mind, and I had no inclination to become acquainted with any one there who taught either mathematics or astronomy: for nothing would serve me but to be a Doctor.

At the end of the second year I left Edinburgh, and went to see my father, thinking myself tolerably well qualified to be a physician in that part of the country; and I carried a good deal of medicines, plaisters, &c. thither.-But, to my mortification, I soon found that all my medical theories and study were of little use in practice. And then, finding that very few paid me for the medicines they had, and that I was far from being so successful as I could wish, I quite left off that business, and began to think of taking to the more sure one of drawing pictures again. For this purpose I went to Inverness, where I had eight months' business.

When I was there, I began to think of astronomy again ; and was heartily sorry for having

quite neglected it at Edinburgh, where I might bave improved my knowledge by conversing with those who were very able to assist me.--I began to compare the ecliptic with its twelve signs (through which the sun goes in twelve months) to the circle of twelve hours on the dial-plate of a watch, the hour-hand to the sun, and the minutehand to the moon, moving in the ecliptic; the one always overtaking the other at a place forwarder than it did at their last conjunction before. On this, I contrived and finished a scheme on paper for shewing the motions and places of the sun and moon in the ecliptic on each day of the year, perpetually; and consequently, the days of all the new and full moons.

To this I wanted to add a method for shewing the eclipses of the sun and moon; of which I knew the cause long before, by having observed that the moon was, for one half of her period, on the north side of the ecliptic, and for the other half on the south. But, having not observed her course long enough among the stars by my above-mentioned thread, so as to delineate her path on my celestial map, in order to find the two opposite points of the ecliptic in which her orbit crosses it, I was altogether at a loss how and where in the ecliptic (in my scheme) to place these intersecting points : this was in the

year

1739. At last, I recollected, that when I was with Squire Grant, of Achoynaney, in the year 1730, I had read, that, on the first of January, 1690, the moon's ascending node was in the 10th minute of the first degree of Aries; and that her nodes moved backward through the whole ecliptic in 18 years and 224 days, which was at the rate of 3 min. 11 sec. every 24 hours. But, as I scarcely knew, in the year 1730, what the moon's nodes meant, I took no further notice of it at that time.

However, in the year 1739, I set to work at Inverness; and after a tedious calculation of the slow motion of the nodes from Jan. 1690 to Jan. 1740, it appeared to me, that (if I was sure I had remembered right) the moon's ascending node must be in 23 deg. 25 min. of Cancer, at the beginning of the year 1740. And so I added the

( eclipse-part to my scheme, and called it The Astronomical Rotula.

When I had finished it, I shewed it to the Rev. Mr. Alexander Mac Bean, one of the ministers at Inverness, who told me he had a set of almanacks by him for several years past, and would examine it by the eclipses mentioned in them. We examined it together, and found that it agreed throughout with the days of all the new and full moons and eclipses mentioned in these almanacks; which made me think I had constructed it upon true astronomical principles. On this, Mr. Mac Bean desired me to write to Mr. Mac Laurin, professor of the mathematics at Edinburgh, and give him an account of the methods by which I had formed my plan, requesting him to correct it where it was wrong. He returned me a most polite and friendly