Excerpt from The Life of Sir William Petty: 1623-1687; One of the First Fellows of the Royal Society Sometime Secretary to Henry Cromwell Maker of the 'Down Survey' of Ireland, Author of 'Political Arithmetic' Chiefly Derived From Private Documents Hitherto Unpublished The present work is mainly founded on the collection of mss. Now at Bowood, consisting of the papers originally belonging to Sir William Petty, which afterwards passed to his grandson, John Fitzmaurice, son of Anne Petty, Countess of Kerry, and afterwards Earl of Shelburne; and of the letters written by Sir William Petty to Sir Robert Southwell, which appear to have been added to the collection at Bowood by the third Marquis of Lansdowne, through a purchase made at the time of the sale of the mss. Of Lord de Clifford, the then representative of the Southwell family. The economic works of Sir William Petty have also been freely referred to, as they frequently throw light on the events of his life, as well as on his opinions relating to politico-economic subjects. I have also used a number of scattered mss., mostly in the Sloane and Egerton collections at the British Museum, and in the Rawlinson collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.