Letter 1503

Brown relays a number of astrological observations, principally about the moon. He hopes they might be published in Philosophical Transactions. Illustrations accompany the letter. Brown references the work of Newton and Huygens. George Brown (1650-1730) was a mathematician. Between 1682 and 1684 he was Minister at Stranraer and in 1685 he was appointed to Kilmaurs in Ayrshire. The Glorious Revolution uprooted Brown. He was forced to move his family to Edinburgh in 1689, from whence he was banished for not praying publicly for William and Mary. He taught Mathematics in Sterling where he invented an instrument for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing called the ‘rotula arithmetica’ and published several mathematical works to accompany the apparatus. He went to London in 1712 (D. J. Bryden, “Brown, George (c.16501730)”, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).