John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. apg 
says he in a letter to a friend, “in 1755,I entered on the 
study of the law, I saw before me such a field of natural, civil, 
and common law, and such a group of men as Gridley, Pratt, 
Otis, Trowbridge, Thacher, Worthington, Hawley, Putnam, 
and others, among whom I must act a part upon the stage, not 
indeed to make my way to fame and fortune (for I thought little 
of either), but to procure a subsistence and live the life of an 
honest man, that I determined to renounce the pursuit of mathe- 
matics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, in which 1 had 
chiefly delighted, in order to devote myself wholly to the law. 
The practice of the law and the avocations of public employment 
afterwards entirely confirmed me in the habit of inattention to the 
sciences, till, in 1784 at Auteuil in France, I had an opportunity 
and felt an obligation to go through a course of mathematics with 
my son John, then a child.”— In a_letter, dated April, 1785, 
recommending his son to a gentleman of our University, he ob- 
serves; “In the course of the last year, instead of playing cards 
like the fashionable world, I have spent my evenings with him. 
We went with some accuracy through the Geometry in ‘The 
Preceptor,’ the eight books of Simpson’s Euclid in Latin, and 
compared it, problem by problem, and theorem by theorem, 
with Le Pére Dechalles in French; we went through Plain 
Trigonometry and Plain Sailing, Fenning’s Algebra, and the Deci- 
mal Fractions, Arithmetical and Geometrical Proportions, and the 
Conic Sections, in Ward’s Mathematics. I then attempted a 
sublime flight, and endeavoured to give him some idea of the 
Differential Method of Calculation of the Marquis de ) Hopital, 
and the Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series of Sir Isaac 
Newton. But alas, it is thirty years since I thought of Mathe- 
matics, and I found I had lost the little I once knew, especially 
