Vossius, GERARD JAN, a great 17th-century scholar, was born of Dutch parents near Heidelberg in 1577. He studied at Leyden, and became in 1600 rector of the school at Dort, in 1615 of the theological college of Leyden. His Historia Pelagiana (1618) offered a modest apology for the Arminians, which brought down upon him the wrath of the orthodox. He anticipated his dismissal by resignation. Land procured him a prebend without residence worth £100 a year. In his book De Historicis Latinis (1627) he made a prudent recantation. In 1632 he was appointed to the chair of History in the newly-founded Athenæum at Amsterdam, and here he died, 27th March 1649. All his life he had toiled with ceaseless industry, of which the chief monuments are Aristarchus sive de Arte Grammatica, De Historicis Græcis, Commentariorum Rhetoricorum sive Oratoriarum Institutionum Libri VI., De Veterum Poetarum Temporibus Libri II.—ISAAC VOSSIUS, his son, was born at Leyden in 1618. He travelled in England, France, and Italy, collecting many valuable manuscripts, and in 1648 took up his abode at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden, but returned to Holland in 1658. In 1670 he settled in England, and here, although a scoffer and a libertine, was appointed by Charles II. a canon of Windsor. He died there in 1688, and it is recorded that on his death-bed he refused to take the sacrament until one of his colleagues argued that he ought to do so for the credit of the chapter.
He was the first to edit the six shorter epistles of Ignatius (1646). Other works were editions of the geographer Scylax, Justin, Pomponius Mela, and Catullus, besides contributions to chronology.