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 was 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 expand his abilities. 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 the light of his own mind. He was author and translator of several useful works, viz., *A New Mathematical Dictionary*, in 8vo, first printed in 1726; *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; *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. xii., p. 218) an "Account of two species of lines of the 3rd 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 In 1742 or 1743 his name was withdrawn from the list of the Royal Society; and in his old age he appears to have been left to poverty and neglect.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.