LISLE, JOSEPH NICHOLAS DE, an eminent astronomer and geographer, was born at Paris in 1688. His education was commenced under his father, and completed at Mazarin College. An eclipse of the sun in 1706 discovered his taste for mathematics, and to the mathematical sciences he began thenceforth to apply himself. He was appointed engineer at Martinico in 1707; and, in 1709, when he was the correspondent of some of the ablest astronomers in Europe, he had constructed a very accurate quadrant for his own use. He received, in 1715, the grant of a pension of
600 livres, but not until pecuniary difficulties had degraded him into an astrologer in the pay of the regent. In that same year he calculated tables of the moon according to the Newtonian theory. Being elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1714, he delivered before that body, in 1723, a memoir on the transits of Mercury. In the ensuing year he visited England, and, through Halley and Newton, was elected a member of the Royal Society. A similar honour was afterwards conferred upon him by every literary society in Europe. In 1726 he accepted an invitation from Catherine I. to the chair of astronomy in the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg. Traveling into Siberia, in 1740, to observe the transit of Mercury over the sun's disc, he was disappointed in his main object by the cloudiness of the atmosphere, but collected much valuable information on the geography of that country. With the aid of his brother Louis, he constructed a map of Russia; and was engaged at intervals for forty years in meteorological observations. After a stay of twenty-one years in Russia, he returned to Paris, and was elected professor of mathematics in the Royal College, where Lalande and Messier were his pupils. Previous to the transit of Mercury over the sun in 1753, he published a map of the world, representing the effect of that planet's parallaxes in different countries. In 1754 he was appointed by the King of France astronomical geographer to the marine. His last work was an account of the comet of 1758, inserted in the Memoirs of the Academy. About the same year he withdrew to the Abbey of St Genevieve, where he died of apoplexy, 11th September 1768. Besides his papers, the principal of which have been mentioned, De Lisle wrote a History of Astronomy, 2 vols. 4to, 1738.