The first year of his residence at Halle was spent upon natural
philosophy and mathematicks; and scarcely any author, ancient or
modern, that has treated on those parts of learning was neglected by
him, nor was he satisfied with the knowledge of what had been
discovered by others, but made new observations, and drew up immense
calculations for his own use.
He then returned to ecclesiastical history, and began to retouch his
Account of Heresies, which he had begun at Schwabach: on this occasion
he read the primitive writers with great accuracy, and formed a
project of regulating the chronology of those ages; which produced a
Chrono-logical Dissertation on the succession of the Bishops of Rome,
from St. Peter to Victor, printed in Latin at Utrecht, 1740.
He afterwards was wholly absorbed in application to polite literature,
and read not only a multitude of writers in the Greek and Latin, but
in the German, Dutch, French, Italian, English, and Arabick languages,
and, in the last year of his life, he was engrossed by the study of
inscriptions, medals, and antiquities of all nations.
In 1737 he resumed his design of finding a certain method of
discovering the longitude, which he imagined himself to have attained
by exact observations of the declination and inclination of the
needle, and sent to the academy of sciences, and to the Royal society
of London, at the same time, an account of his schemes; to which it
was first answered by the Royal society, that it appeared the same
with one which Mr.
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