ch he was assisted by his
daughter; and _The Virgin Birth of Our Lord_ (1909).

BRIGGS, HENRY (1556-1630), English mathematician, was born at Warley Wood,
near Halifax, in Yorkshire. He graduated at St John's College, Cambridge,
in 1581, and obtained a fellowship in 1588. In 1592 he was made reader of
the physical lecture founded by Dr Thomas Linacre, and in 1596 first
professor of geometry in Gresham House (afterwards College), London. In his
lectures at Gresham House he proposed the alteration of the scale of
logarithms from the hyperbolic form which John Napier had given them, to
that in which unity is assumed as the logarithm of the ratio of ten to one;
and soon afterwards he wrote to the inventor on the subject. In 1616 he
paid a visit to Napier at Edinburgh in order to discuss the suggested
change; and next year he repeated his visit for a similar purpose. During
these conferences the alteration proposed by Briggs was agreed upon; and on
his return from his second visit to Edinburgh in 1617 he accordingly
published the first chiliad of his logarithms. (See NAPIER, JOHN.) In 1619
he was appointed Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, and resigned his
professorship of Gresham College on the 25th of July 1620. Soon after his
settlement at Oxford he was incorporated master of arts. In 1622 he
published a small tract on the _North-West Passage to the South Seas,
through the Continent of Virginia and Hudson's Bay_; and in 1624 his
_Arithmetica Logarithmica_, in folio, a work containing the logarithms of
thirty thousand natural numbers to fourteen places of figures besides the
index. He also completed a table of logarithmic sines and tangents for the
hundredth part of every degree to fourteen places of figures besides the
index, with a table of natural sines to fifteen places, and the tangents
and secants for the same to ten places; all of which were printed at Gouda
in 1631 and published in 1633 under the title of _Trigonometria Britannica_
(see TABLE, MATHEMATICAL). Briggs died on the 26th of January 1630, and was
buried in Merton College chapel, Oxford. Dr Smith, in his _Lives of the
Gresham Professors_, characterizes him as a man of great probity, a
contemner of riches, and contented with his own station, preferring a
studious retirement to all the splendid circumstances of life.

His works are: _A Table to find the Height of the Pole, the Magnetical
Declination being given_ (London, 1602, 4to); "Tables for the Im