BUXTON, JEDEDIAH, a prodigy of skill in numbers. His father, William Buxton, was schoolmaster of the same parish where he was born in 1704; yet Jedediah's education was so much neglected, that he was never taught to write; and with respect to any other knowledge but that of numbers, he seemed always as ignorant as a boy of ten years of age. How he came first to know the relative proportions of numbers, and their progressive denominations, he did not remember; but to this he applied the whole force of his mind, and upon this his attention was constantly fixed; so that he frequently took no cognizance of external objects, and when he did, it was only with reference