A Biographical Memoir Of Samuel Hartlib, Milton’s Familiar Friend

A Biographical Memoir Of Samuel Hartlib, Milton’s Familiar Friend is an 1865 study by Henry Dircks (1806-1873), the English engineer, inventor of Pepper’s Ghost stage illusion, and historian of industrial and scientific biography. Dircks turned in his later years to the recovery of forgotten figures of seventeenth-century English scientific and educational reform, and this memoir is the first sustained nineteenth-century biographical study of Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-1662), the Polish-born Prussian intelligencer who settled in London in the 1620s and became a central figure in the Hartlib Circle of correspondents on education, agriculture, religion, and natural philosophy. Hartlib was a friend of John Milton, who dedicated Of Education to him in 1644. Dircks’s memoir gathers the surviving printed sources and remained the standard English account of Hartlib until the twentieth-century scholarship of George Turnbull and Charles Webster. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.