FRANCIS. The history of this gentleman affords a remarkable instance of that energy with which a man successfully engaged in a laborious mercantile occupation, can devote his leisure to abstruse mathematical investigations. Mr Bailly was born in Berkshire in 1774, and for many years was a stockbroker in London. While amassing a large fortune by his business, he had applied his profound mathematical knowledge to the doctrine of probabilities, and published several interesting works on that subject; as, Tables for the Purchasing and Renewing of Leases; The Doctrine of Interest and Annuities; The Doctrine of Annuities and Assurances, &c. In 1820 he was one of the original and most active promoters of the Astronomical Society; and on his retirement from business in 1825, he entered with all the energy of youth, rather than that of a man between fifty and sixty, into the cultivation of astronomy and its kindred sciences. To Mr Bailly we owe the present form and improvement of the Nautical Almanac; he took an active part in the investigation of the effects of the atmosphere on the nice experiments with the pendulum; he aided in the repetition of the famous experiments of Cavendish on the specific gravity of the earth; he superintended the publication Bainbridge of the Astronomical Society's catalogue of the fixed stars; and the revision of the annual catalogues in the 13th volume of the Society's Memoirs was entirely his work. Besides these labours, he took an active share in the physical labours of the British Association. It was on his recommendation that it undertook the republication of the Histoire Celeste of Lalande, combined with Lacaille's catalogue, which together contain no less than 57,000 stars; and there is reason to believe that the investigations concerning the course of the tidal wave in the Atlantic, owed much of their value to this able philosopher. He also superintended the construction and printing of the tables of coefficients of reduction for the 10,000 stars in the Astronomical Society's catalogue; and he had undertaken to superintend the construction of the new metrical scale for government, on the destruction of the original by fire.

In fact, Mr Bailly effected, in the last twenty years of his very active and useful career, a greater number of complete and refined researches than most other philosophers have accomplished during a whole lifetime. He died on 30th August 1844.