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XXIX. Mathematics and Mathematicians. The Journals of the 

 late Reuben Burrow. By T. T. Wilkinson, Esq., F.R.A.S,^ 



No. I. 



OF all the non-academic geometers of the last half-century 

 none appears to have been more distinguished than Mr. 

 Keuben Burrow. His name to mathematicians of the English 

 school is almost as a household word ; and as a geometer he may 

 be said, without exaggeration, to have equalled any of his con- 

 temporaries. Dr. Stewart himself not excepted. His early history 

 is involved in much obscurity ; nor had his career through life 

 and his premature death been noticed beyond the immediate 

 circle of his friends previously to the appearance of a posthumous 

 " Memoir '' of " that distinguished, elegant Geometer, and able 

 Mathematician, Reuben Burrow,^^ by his admirer the late J. H. 

 Swale, in the Mechanics^ Magazine for October 1850. From 

 this short sketch, which was no doubt originally prepared for 

 Leybourn^s Mathematical Repository, it appears that Mr. Bur- 

 row was born on the 30th of December 1747, at Hoberley near 

 Shadwell, a village about five miles north-east of Leeds in York- 

 shire. His principal tutor in mathematics was Mr. Crooks, 

 master of a commercial and mathematical school at Leeds, but 

 in after life Mr. Burrow removed to Portsmouth and opened a 

 school on his own account. Subsequently we find him at Green- 

 wich as Assistant Astronomer to Dr. Maskelyne, and in 1774 he 

 was associated with him in Perthshire, instituting a series of ob- 

 servations and making surveys on the mountain Schiehallien, in 

 order to determine its attraction. He was afterwards appointed 

 to the office of " Teacher of Mathematics at the Drawing Room 

 in the Tower;" but in 1782, at the instance of Colonel Henry 

 Watson, he relinquished all his engagements in this country and 

 went to India, where he died at Buxor on the 7th of June 1792, 

 in the 45th year of his age. 



His connexion with " Thomas Carnan, in St. PauPs Church 

 Yard, who dispossessed the Stationers' Company of the exclusive 

 privilege of printing Almanacks, which they had unjustly mono- 

 polised for 170 years,'' and the contents of his papers in the 

 noted Lady's and Gentleman's Diary, published by them in 

 opposition to the supposed rights of the Stationers' Company, 

 have already been noticed at considerable length in the Mecha- 

 nics' Magazine, vol. li. ; nor need we stay to enumerate his 

 Essays on Friction, the Hindoo knowledge of the Binomial 

 Theorem, &c., in the early volumes of the Asiatic Researches, 

 since most of these have subsequently been transferred to the 

 * Communicated b]^ the Author. 



mi. Mag, S. 4. Vol. 5. No. 31 . March 1853. 



