Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 24.djvu/118

 at the elder Hallett's academy. Fox describes Hallett as ‘a popular preacher, learned and laborious,’ and characterises his publications as having ‘much more of clergy than of the mother in them.’ He attempted to steer, with Clarke, a middle course between Arianism and orthodoxy. His conjectural emendations of the received text of the Hebrew scriptures were in very many instances confirmed as various readings by Kennicott. He died on 2 April 1744.

He published: 1. ‘The Belief of the Subordination of the Son … no characteristick of an Arian,’ &c., Exeter, 1719, fol. 2. ‘Reflections on the … Reasons why many citizens of Exeter,’ &c., 1720, 8vo. 3. ‘The Unity of God not inconsistent with the Divinity of Christ,’ &c., 1720, 8vo. 4. ‘A Funeral Sermon for the Rev. James Peirce,’ &c., 1726, 8vo. 5. ‘Index Librorum MSS. … et Versionum … Novi Fœderis,’ &c., 1728, 8vo. 6. ‘A Free and Impartial Study of the Holy Scriptures … being Notes … Discourses, and Observations,’ &c., 1729, 8vo; 2nd vol. 1732, 8vo; 3rd vol. 1736, 8vo (his main work). 7. ‘A Defence of a Discourse on the Impossibility of Proving a Future State by the Light of Nature,’ &c., 1731, 8vo (in answer to Henry Grove [q. v.]). 8. ‘A Paraphrase and Notes on … Philemon,’ &c., 1731, 4to (anon.). 9. ‘A Paraphrase … on the Three Last Chapters of … Hebrews,’ &c., 1733, 4to. 10. ‘The Consistent Christian,’ &c., 1738, 8vo (against Chubb, Woolston, and Morgan), also some other tracts in the Arian controversy and against the Deists.

[Whiston's Memoirs, 1753, pp. 127 sq.; Fox's Memoirs in Monthly Repository, 1821, pp. 131 sq.; Murch's Hist. Presb. and Gen. Bapt. Churches in West of Engl., 1835, pp. 386 sq.; Christian Reformer, 1836, p. 34; manuscript list of ordinations in records of Exeter Assembly.]  HALLEY, EDMUND (1656–1742), astronomer, was born at Haggerston, in St. Leonard's parish, Shoreditch, London, on 8 Nov. 1656. His father, Edmund Halley, a member of a good Derbyshire family, had a soap-boiling establishment in Winchester Street in the city of London. He was rich, and sent his only son to St. Paul's School, under the care of Dr. Thomas Gale [q. v.] Here he was equally distinguished in classics and mathematics, rose to be captain of the school at fifteen, constructed dials, observed the change in the variation of the compass, and studied the heavens so closely that it was remarked by Moxon the globe maker ‘that if a star were displaced in the globe he would presently find it out.’ He entered Queen's College, Oxford, as a commoner at midsummer term 1673, carrying with him, besides a competent knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, a ‘curious apparatus’ of instruments. With a telescope of 24 feet he observed a lunar eclipse on 27 June 1675 in Winchester Street, and at Oxford a remarkable sunspot in July and August 1676 (Phil. Trans. xl. 687), and the occultation of Mars by the moon on 21 Aug. 1676 (ib. p. 683). Before he was twenty he communicated to the Royal Society a ‘Direct and Geometrical Method of finding the Aphelia and Eccentricity of the Planets’ (ib. p. 683), finally abolishing the notion of a ‘centre of uniform motion;’ invented shortly afterwards an improved construction for solar eclipses, and noted defects in the theories of Jupiter and Saturn. For the correction of these he perceived that a revision of the places of the fixed stars was indispensable, and with the design of supplementing in the southern hemisphere the labours of Flamsteed and Hevelius in the northern, he left the university without a degree, and embarked for St. Helena in November 1676. His father allowed him 300l. a year; a recommendation from Charles II to the East India Company procured him facilities of transport; but the climate proved unfavourable, and by assiduous observations during eighteen months with a 5½-foot sextant he succeeded in determining only 341 stars. His enterprise, however, laid the foundation of austral stellar astronomy, and earned for him from Flamsteed the title of the ‘Southern Tycho.’ In the course of the voyage he improved the sextant, collected a number of valuable facts relative to the ocean and atmosphere, noted the equatorial retardation of the pendulum, and made at St. Helena, on 7 Nov. 1677, the first complete observation of a transit of Mercury.

On his return to England in October 1678 Halley presented to the king a planisphere of the southern constellations, including that of ‘Robur Carolinum,’ newly added by himself, and was rewarded with a mandamus to the university of Oxford for a degree of M.A., conferred on 3 Dec. 1678. His ‘Catalogus Stellarum Australium’ was laid before the Royal Society on 7 Nov. 1678, and immediately translated into French; but owing to his dependence upon Tycho's fundamental points it was of little practical value until Sharp reduced and included in the third volume of Flamsteed's ‘Historia Cœlestis’ (p. 77) 265 of the stars it contained. Halley appended to his ‘Catalogue’ a proposal for amending lunar theory by the introduction of an annual equation, and an account of the transit of Mercury, from which he deduced a solar parallax of 45″. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 30 Nov.