HARTLIB, Samuel (c. 1600-1662) was born towards the beginning of the 17th century at Elbing in Prussia, his father being a refugee from Poland. His mother was English. About 1628 Hartlib came to England, where he carried on a mercantile agency, and at the same time found leisure to enter with interest into the public questions of the day. An enthusiastic admirer of Comenius, he published in 1637 his Conatum Comenian-orum Proeludia, and in 1639 Comenii Pansophioe Prodromus et Didactica Dissertatio. In 1641 appeared his Relation of that which hath been lately attempted to procure Ecclesiastical Peace among Protestants, and A Description of Macaria, containing his ideas of what a model state should be. During the civil war Hartlib occupied himself with the peaceful study of agriculture, printing at his own expense several treatises by others on the subject. In 1650 he issued the Discourse of Flanders Husbandry by Sir Richard Weston; and in 1651 his Legacy, or an Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry used in Brabant and Flanders, by Robert Child (see Agriculture, vol. i. p. 297). For his various labours Hartlib received from Cromwell a pension of £100, afterwards increased to £300, as he had spent all his fortune on his experiments. He planned a school for the sons of gentlemen, to be conducted on new principles, and this probably was the occasion of his friend Milton’s Tractate on Education, addressed to him in 1644, and of Sir William Petty’s Two Letters on the same subject, in 1647 and 1648. His own literary labours were mostly confined to prefaces and short essays. Blythe, a contemporary, says that Ad. Speed, while engaged on his Improvements in Husbandry, was lodged and entertained by Samuel Hartlib. At the Restoration Hartlib lost his pension, which had ...