793,
with a very high reputation as a lawyer and a Judge. These facts are partly
from Meadley's _Life of Paley_,[492] no doubt from Paley himself, partly
from the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and from an epitaph written by Bishop
Watson.[493] Wilson did not publish anything: the theorem by which he has
cut his name in the theory of numbers was communicated to Waring, by whom
it was published. He married, in 1788, a daughter of Serjeant Adair,[494]
and left issue. _Had a family_, many will say: but a man and his wife are a
family, even without children. An actuary may be allowed to be accurate in
this matter, of which I was reminded by what an actuary wrote of another
actuary. William Morgan,[495] in the life of his uncle Dr. Richard
Price,[496] says that the Doctor and his {224} wife were "never blessed
with an addition to their family." I never met with such accuracy
elsewhere. Of William Morgan I add that my surname and pursuits have
sometimes, to my credit be it said, made a confusion between him and me.
Dates are nothing to the mistaken; the last three years of Morgan's life
were the first three years of my actuary-life (1830-33). The mistake was to
my advantage as well as to my credit. I owe to it the acquaintance of one
of the noblest of the human race, I mean Elizabeth Fry,[497] who came to me
for advice about a philanthropic design, which involved life questions,
under a general impression that some Morgan had attended to such
things.[498]

{225}

NEWTON AGAIN OVERTHROWN.

A treatise on the sublime science of heliography, satisfactorily
demonstrating our great orb of light, the sun, to be absolutely no
other than a body of ice! Overturning all the received systems of the
universe hitherto extant; proving the celebrated and indefatigable Sir
Isaac Newton, in his theory of the solar system, to be as far distant
from the truth, as many of the heathen authors of Greece and Rome. By
Charles Palmer,[499] Gent. London, 1798, 8vo.

Mr. Palmer burned some tobacco with a burning glass, saw that a lens of ice
would do as well, and then says:

"If we admit that the sun could be removed, and a terrestrial body of ice
placed in its stead, it would produce the same effect. The sun is a
crystaline body receiving the radiance of God, and operates on this earth
in a similar manner as the light of the sun does when applied to a convex
mirror or glass."

Nov. 10, 1801. The Rev. Thomas Cormouls,[500