[15] They were composed originally, in a somewhat different and rather more extended form, as the second part of an English treatise on Optics, completed by the year 1646. Of this treatise, preserved in Harleian MSS. 3360, Molesworth otherwise prints the dedication to the marquis of Newcastle, and the concluding paragraphs (E.W. vii. 467-471).
[16] L.W. iv. 1-232. The propositions on the circle, forty-six in number (shattered by Wallis in 1662), were omitted by Hobbes when he republished the Dialogues in 1668, in the collected edition of his Latin works from which Molesworth reprints. In the part omitted, at p. 154 of the original edition, Hobbes refers to his first introduction to Euclid, in a way that confirms the story in Aubrey quoted in an earlier paragraph.
[17] Remaining at Oxford, Wallis, in fact, took no active part in the constitution of the new society, but he had been, from 1645, one of the originators of an earlier association in London, thus continued or revived. This earlier society had been continued also at Oxford after the year 1649, when Wallis and others of its members received appointments there.
[18] The Problemata physica was at the same time put into English (with some changes and omission of part of the mathematical appendix), and presented to the king, to whom the work was dedicated in a remarkable letter apologizing for Leviathan. In its English form, as Seven Philosophical Problems and Two Propositions of Geometry (E.W. vii. 1-68), the work was first published in 1682, after Hobbes’s death.
[19] Wallis’s pieces were excluded from the collected edition of his works (1693-1697), and have become extremely rare.
[20] The De medio animarum statu of Thomas White, a heterodox Catholic priest, who contested the natural immortality of the soul. White (who died 1676) and Hobbes were friends.
[21] E.W. vi. 161-418. Though Behemoth was kept back at the king’s express desire, it saw the light, without Hobbes’s leave, in 1679, before his death.
HOBBY, a small horse, probably from early quotations, of Irish breed, trained to an easy gait so that riding was not fatiguing. The common use of the word is for a favourite pursuit or occupation, with the idea either of excessive devotion or of absence of ulterior motive or of profit, &c., outside the occupation itself. This use is probably not derived from the easy ambling gait of the Irish “hobby,” but from the “hobby-horse,” the mock horse of the old morris-dances, made of a painted wooden horse’s head and tail, with a framework casing for an actor’s body, his legs being covered by a cloth made to represent the “housings” of the medieval tilting-horse. A hobby or hobby-horse is thus a toy, a diversion. The O. Fr. hobin, or hobi, Mod. aubin, and Ital. ubina are probably adaptations of the English, according to the New English Dictionary. The O. Fr. hober, to move, which is often taken to be the origin of all these words, is the source of a use of “hobby” for a small kind of falcon, falco subbuteo, used in hawking.