THE LANCASHIRE GEOMETERS AND THEIR WRITINGS. 



127 



ingenious mathematician, Mr. John Jackson," and "he, having 

 discharged himself well becoming his parts and character in 

 the reading of several extraordinary ones in Geometry," which 

 were afterwards published, may justly be regarded as the 

 Father of the Lancashire School of Geometers. At a later 

 period, a.d. 1728 — 1763, the name of "John Hampson, of. 

 Leigh, in Lancashire," appears as a correspondent to the 

 Lady's Diary, but since he mainly confined his speculations 

 to the Diophantine Analysis, he cannot be considered to have 

 caught the mantle of his predecessor. 



The Manchester Society does not appear to have produced 

 any very immediate effects, for although its existence would 

 tend to nourish and preserve the incipient taste for Geometry 

 thus produced by the discourses of Mr. Jackson, no Lancashire 

 name overtops the common mass until that of Mr. Jeremiah 

 Ainsworth, the grandfather of the gifted novelist, William 

 Harrison Ainsworth, appears in the Mathematical Maga- 

 zine for 1761. Mr. Ainsworth subsequently associated with 

 Dr. Henry Clarke and Mr. George Taylor, two gentlemen of 

 kindred tastes then resident in the neighbourhood of Man- 

 chester, and these veterans in science soon collected around 

 them a goodly array of pupils and admirers, who subsequently 

 occupied the foremost rank of the cultivators of pure geo- 

 metry. Their influence and example resulted in the forma- 

 tion of a Mathematical Society at Oldham, in a.d. 1794, by 

 Messrs. Abraham Jackson, William Hilton, William Travis, 

 James Travis, and John Bardsley, whose members soon dis- 

 tanced those of the parent society in geometrical pursuits. 

 The establishment of this society supplied the requisite 

 impulse for the full development of this local geometrical 

 taste, and no reasonable doubt can exist that the Man- 

 chester and Oldham Mathematical Societies were really the 

 great promoters of the revival of the study of the ancient 

 Geometry in Lancashire; — for during the latter half of the 

 last century, and almost up to the present date, they have 

 numbered amongst tfeeir members several of the most dis- 



