*• "'*'*'*■ ^ the Journals of the late Reuben Burrow. 515 



" Costard has treated this echpse particularly in a disser- 

 tation. 



'' Apparent conjunction at Smyrna^ 35 minutes past 12 at 

 noon; 11^ digits eclipsed." 



The disfigured pages to which 1 allude are mostly occupied 

 by rough sketches of the diagrams belonging to the geometrical 

 papers inserted in the first number of Carnan's Diary. One of 

 these has reference to the properties of Halley^s Diagram, which 

 has since been found so prolific of relations in the hands of 

 Davies, Weddle and Elliott, under the title of Horcs Geome- 

 triccB ; another belongs to the *' very useful Lemma " that '^ the 

 diff^erence of any two sides of a plane triangle is less than the 

 third side" (Diary, 1776, p. 34) ; — of the rest several relate to the 

 papers on " Geometrical Sums and Difi'erences," '^ Limits of 

 Geometrical Quantities ; " and one or two appear to have been 

 sketched when considering the *' very difficult problems on the 

 maxima and minima," subsequently proposed as prize questions 

 in his Diary. A " List of Oxford and Cambridge terms," and 

 a series of notes on the '^Eclipses in 1776," which occur among 

 these rude sketches, with a memorandum to " take the rest from 

 the Ephemeris" afford sufficient evidence that the Lady^s and 

 Gentleman^s Diary was in active preparation, and suggest the 

 reflection that at all events Mr. Burrow knew " how to make 

 an Almanacky'^ whatever might be the defects of Hutton and 

 Maskelyne. 



" September 10, 1775. Messrs. Wales, Bayly and Todd 

 called upon me at night, and Wales proposed a question which 

 1 told him how to solve directly by means of a hyperbola. He 

 seemed to think that I had not used Maskelyne well, but said 

 little about it. I mentioned that 1 had done a good deal about 

 Euclid's Porisms, and we had some talk about the method of 

 the Ancients. I told him that Dr. Horsley's book De Inclina- 

 tionibus was much longer than it need to be ;— 1 also showed 

 him my paper about Perfect Numbers, and he offered me a ques- 

 tion, but desired me to put it under Thomas Barker's name, so 

 I refused it. We afterwards went out and called upon Keech, 

 but he was not at home. 1 told Bayly that I should put a 

 method of placing a sector in the plane of the meridian into my 

 Almanack, and he said that Maskelyne had mentioned some such 

 method to the Royal Society when the paper about the business 

 was read when 1 was not there. Bayly said that Maskelyne got 

 great praise for speaking so favourably of me in his paper. I 

 asked him why ? He said that Maskelyne stated that I did all 

 the surveying [at Schiehallien] and found out all the methods for 

 doing it. I asked whether he also mentioned what I had done 

 about the observations, and he said that Maskelyne did not, I 



