VARENUS (Augustus), a famous Lutheran divine, was born in the duchy of Lunenburg in 1620. He became so well skilled in the Hebrew tongue, that he was considered in Germany as the best skilled in that language of all the Protestants, except the Buxtorfs; and he had such a prodigious memory, that he knew the Hebrew text of all the Old Testament by heart. He wrote a Commentary on the prophecy of Isaiah, and many other works.
He ought not to be confounded with Bernard Varenus,
Vari. renius, a Dutchman and an able physician, who wrote an esteemed geographical treatise, intitled Geographia universalis, in qua Affectiones generales Telluris explicantur, which was translated by Sir Isaac Newton.