amuel Coates,"
says Mr. Needles, "of this city (Philadelphia), and gave
correct answers to all their questions such as, How many
seconds there are in a year and a half? In two minutes he
answered 47,304,000. How many seconds in seventy years,
seventeen days, twelve hours? In one minute and a half,
2,110,500,800.[617]

That he was a prodigy, no one will question.[618] He was the wonder of
the age. The following appeared in several newspapers at the time of
his death:--

"DIED,--Negro Tom, the famous African calculator, aged 80
years. He was the property of Mrs. Elizabeth Cox, of
Alexandria. Tom was a very black man. He was brought to this
country at the age of fourteen, and was sold as a slave with
many of his unfortunate countrymen. This man was a prodigy.
Though he could neither read nor write, he had perfectly
acquired the use of enumeration. He could give the number of
months, days, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds, for any
period of time that a person chose to mention, allowing in
his calculations for all the leap years that happened in the
time. He would give the number of poles, yards, feet,
inches, and barley-corns in a given distance--say, the
diameter of the earth's orbit--and in every calculation he
would produce the true answer in less time than ninety-nine
out of a hundred men would take with their pens. And what
was, perhaps, more extraordinary, though interrupted in the
progress of his calculations, and engaged in discourse upon
any other subject, his operations were not thereby in the
least deranged; he would go on where he left off, and could
give any and all of the stages through which the calculation
had passed.

"Thus died Negro Tom, this untaught arithmetician, this
untutored scholar. Had his opportunities of improvement been
equal to those of thousands of his fellow-men, neither the
Royal Society of London, the Academy of Science at Paris,
nor even a Newton himself need have been ashamed to
acknowledge him a brother in science."[619]

DERHAM THE PHYSICIAN.

Through all time the science of medicine has been regarded as ranking
among the most intricate and delicate pursuits man could follow. Our
Saviour was called "the Great Physician," and St. Luke "the beloved
physician." No profession brings a man so near to humanity, and