Burnet, THOMAS

Burnet, THOMAS, born in Yorkshire about 1635, studied at Cambridge, and in 1685 was elected Master of the Charterhouse. He succeeded Archbishop Tillotson as clerk of the closet to William III., but having in 1692 published a work, Archæologia Philosophica (also in English), displaying great learning, but treating the Mosaic account of the Fall as an allegory, he was obliged to retire from the clerkship, and lived in the Charterhouse till his death in 1715. His Telluris Theoria Sacra (1680-89) was written in Latin, but translated, or rather recomposed in English, by the author. It is an ingenious speculation, written in ignorance of the facts of the earth's structure, and is therefore a mere system of cosmogony, and not geology. But it abounds in sublime and poetical conceptions and descriptions, and called forth the highest applause at the time. See Life by Heathcote prefixed to the seventh edition of the Theory (1759).