124, 



MR. T. T. WILKINSON OS 



sacred fire under circumstances which would seem from their 

 Mature most calculated to extinguish it. In many modern 

 publications, and occasionally in the Senate House Problems 

 proposed to the candidates for honours at Cambridge, questions 

 are to be met with derived from this humble but honourable 

 source. The true cause of this remarkable phenomenon I have 

 not been able clearly to trace. 



" A taste for pure Geometry, something like that for 

 Entomology among the weavers of Spitalfields, may have 

 been transmitted from father to son ; but who was the 

 distinguished individual first to create it in the peculiar 

 race of men here adverted to, seems not to be known. 

 Surrounded with machinery, with the rich elements of 

 Mechanics in their most attractive forms, we should have 

 imagined that a taste for mechanical combinations would have 

 exclusively prevailed ; and that inquiries locked up in the 

 deep, and to them unapproachable recesses of Plato, Pappus, 

 ApoUonius, and Euclid, would have met with but few culti- 

 vators. On the contrary, Porisms and Loci, Sections of Ratio 

 and of Space, Inclinations and Tangencies — subjects confined 

 among the Ancients to the very greatest minds — were here 

 familiar to men whose condition in life was, to say the least, 

 most unpropitious for the successful prosecution of such ele- 

 vated and profound pursuits. The contrast also between the 

 northern and southern parts of England, in this particular, 

 was most remarkable. In the latter the torch of Geometry 

 emitted but a feeble ray; while in the former it existed in its 

 purest and most splendid form. The two great restorers of 

 the ancient Geometry, Robert Simson and Matthew Stewart, 

 it may be observed, lived in Scotland. Did their proximity 

 encourage the growth of this spirit ? Or, were their writings 

 cultivated by some teacher of a village school, who communi- 

 cated by a method which genius of a transcendental order 

 knows so well how to employ, a taste for these sublime 

 inquiries, so that at length they gradually worked their way 

 lo the anvil and tlie loom?" 



