HUET, Pierre Daniel (1630-1721), bishop of Avranches, is the last of those encyclopaedic and massive scholars of whom France produced so many. He left no successor to his omnivorous learning, prodigious memory, and indomitable energy. He was born at Caen of a family formerly Huguenot. He lost both father and mother while still a child, and was brought up by his aunt, wife of the mathematician Gilles Macé, to whom he owed his respect , for science. He says himself that the ardour of study did not possess him in earnest until in early manhood he was reading the Géographie Sacrée of Bochart, and suddenly became intoxicated with the desire of becoming a scholar. It may be remarked that a youth who was not already studious would hardly be reading such a book. However, the statement means that he began about that time to study not in earnest only but with passion and fury. In Hebrew alone so great was bis industry that he read through the Old Testament in the original no less than four-and-twenty times during his life. At the age of twenty he had already achieved a reputation as one of the most promising scholars of the time. He went at the age of twenty-one to Paris, where he formed a friendship with Gabriel Maude, conservator of the Mazarin library. In the following year Bochart, being invited by Queen Christina to her court at Stockholm, took his friend Huet with him. This journey, in which he saw Leyden, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, as well as Stockholm, resulted chiefly in the discovery of some fragments of Origen’s Commentary on St Matthew, which gave Huet the idea of editing Origen. On his return to France he assisted at the foundation of the academy of Caen, and shortly afterwards quarrelled with his friend Bochart, who accused him of having suppressed a line in ...