Intellectual Pursuits
Burnet's rarefied education brought him a lifelong interest in scientific and mathematical pursuits. He was proposed for membership in the Royal Society by Isaac Newton in 1705, and was enrolled as a fellow in February 1705/6. He was acquainted with the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, and was a regular correspondent on a wide array of scientific subjects with Philadelphia merchant and politician James Logan. He reported to the Royal Society observations of the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, and on an unusual instance of Hungarian conjoined twins he saw while resident in The Hague in 1708. Observations he made of eclipses of the moons of Jupiter while he was governor of New York were used to more precisely determine New York City's longitude. During his tenure in New York he was relatively starved for intellectual discourse; he briefly met a young Benjamin Franklin and encouraged him in his intellectual pursuits.
Like his teacher Isaac Newton, Burnet also wrote on religious subjects. In 1724 he anonymously published An Essay on Scripture Prophecy, Wherein it is Endeavoured to Explain the three periods Contain'd in the Xii Chapter of the Prophet Daniel With some Arguments to make it Probable that the FIRST of the PERIODS did Expire in the Year 1715. In this work he put forward a Millenialist argument that Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1790, based on his numerological interpretation of the Book of Daniel.
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