LISLE, Joseph Nicolas de (1688-1768), astronomer, was born at Paris on April 4, 1688, and was educated at the Collége Mazarin. His devotion to astronomy dates from 1706, in which year he carefully observed an eclipse of the sun. In 1714 he was admitted to the Academy of Sciences, and in 1720 he made the proposals for determining the figure of the earth, which were carried out under the auspices of that body some years afterwards. In 1724 De Lisle visited England, where, through Newton and Halley, he was received into the Royal Society, and in 1726 he accepted an invitation from Catherine I. to the chair of astronomy in the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg. In 1747 he returned to Paris, and was allowed a very imperfect observatory in the Hôtel Cluny, where Messier and Lalande were among his pupils. In 1753, previous to the transit of Mercury, he published a map of the world representing the effect of that planet’s parallaxes in different countries, and in 1754 he was made geographical astronomer to the naval department. In 1762 he resigned in favour of Lalande, and withdrew to the abbey of Sainte Geneviève, where he died of apoplexy on September 11, 1768.

Besides numerous papers contributed to the Transactions of the Academies of Paris, Berlin, and St Petersburg, he wrote Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et aux progrès de l’Astronomie, de la Géographie, et de la Physique (St Petersburg, 1738), Eclipses circum-jovialium, ad annos 1734, 1738, et menses priores 1739 (Berlin, 1734), and Mémoire sur les nouvelles découvertes au nord de la mer du Sud (Paris, 1752-53). See Astronomy, vol. ii. p. 757.