a town in the hundred of Firehill and county of Stafford, 141 miles from London. It is pleasantly situated on the banks of the river Trent, is neat and well built; and by means of a canal has an easy communication with most parts of the kingdom. The church is a fine structure, with a square tower and a good set of bells. The inhabitants amounted in 1801 to 2305, in 1811 to 2314, in 1821 to 2855, and in 1831 to 3460. Stone, Edmund, a distinguished self-taught mathematician, was born in Scotland, but neither the place nor the time of his birth is well known; nor have we any memoirs of his early life, except in a letter from the Chevalier Ramsay to Father Castel, a Jesuit of Paris, and published in the Mémoires de Trevoux. Born the son of a gardener of the Duke of Argyle, he arrived at eight years of age before he learned to read. By chance a servant having taught him the letters of the alphabet, there needed nothing more to discover and expand his genius. He applied himself to study, and arrived at the knowledge of the most sublime geometry and analysis, without a master, without a conductor, without any other guide but pure genius. He was author and translator of several useful works, viz. 1. A New Mathematical Dictionary, in 8vo, first printed in 1726. 2. Fluxions, in 8vo, 1730. The Direct Method is a translation from the French of De l'Hospital's "Analyse des infiniment Petits;" and the Inverse Method was supplied by Stone himself. 3. The Elements of Euclid, in 2 vols. 8vo, 1731. Stone was a fellow of the Royal Society, and had inserted in the Philosophical Transactions (vol. xlii. p. 218) an "Account of two species of lines of the 3d order, not mentioned by Sir Isaac Newton or Mr Stirling." In 1758 he published "The Construction and principal Uses of Mathematical Instruments: translated from the French of M. Bion." In 1742 or 1743 his name was withdrawn from the list of the Royal Society; and in his old age he appears to have been left to poverty and neglect. He survived till March or April 1768.

Stone, Jerome, the son of a seaman, was born in the parish of Scoonie, Fifehire. His father died abroad when he was but three years of age, and his mother, with her young family, was left in very narrow circumstances. Jerome having obtained the ordinary school education, reading English, writing, and arithmetic, betook himself to the business of a pedlar. He began his philological pursuits with the study of the Hebrew and Greek tongues, and made himself so far master of these, without any assistance, as to be able to interpret the Hebrew Bible and Greek Testament into English ad aperturam libri. At this time he did not know one word of Latin. Some time afterwards, he was encouraged to prosecute his studies at the university of St Andrews; and an unexampled proficiency in every branch of literature recommended him to the esteem of the professors. Having finished his studies, he settled as schoolmaster at Dunkeld, where he died in 1757, in the 30th year of his age.