1816.] Mathematical Sciences in Great Britain. 93 
and the French translation of the Works of Archimedes? Unfor- 
tunately, we have not a single volume of a similar description to 
place to the credit of England ! ; 
The works that I have above enumerated, the reader will be 
aware, are but a few out of a great number that might have been 
produced in defence of my argument ; but those which have been 
selected may be considered like stars of the first magnitude in a 
constellation of discoveries and improvements. They are inter- 
mingled with a thousand minor objects, which, though they seem 
to add to the general brilliancy, present nothing, when separately 
examined, worthy of our fixed regard and attention. This is most 
undoubtedly the case with a great number of the present French 
authors ; who, by attempting to imitate the distinguished geometers 
above referred to, without any of the talent necessary for such pur- 
suits, have run into the most ridiculous absurdities, which, with the 
smatterers in those sciences, pass for profound and learned disquisi- 
tions, for no other reason but because they are abstruse and unin- 
telligible. Even many of the most celebrated mathematical authors 
of that nation‘are not without censure in this respect; a simple 
fact simply related has no charm for a Frenchman; nothing appears 
grand in his eye until it is enveloped in some splendid mystery, and 
ushered into the world in all the ‘* mazes of a mystical confusion.” 
The great object ef a French mathematician is generalization, 
and simplicity seems to be regarded by him only as a mark of in- 
ferior genius. Still, however, I am not aware of this mania having 
been carried by any of them to so great a length as it has been by 
one of their humble imitators in this country, who has lately shown 
his ingenuity and want of judgment by demonstrating the 47th 
proposition of Euclid’s first book, by means of the doctrine of 
generating functions ! 
Such attempts as these are absurd and ridicuious. It is not by 
intricate formulz and refined quackery that the character of English 
science is to be established. 1t was not specious reports and gasco- 
nading bulletins that rendered the English arms triumphant, but 
plain statements of facts, well concerted measures, and steady per- 
severance, It was these that crowned our arms with victory, and 
placed our officers in the first rank of military heroes; and the 
same measures would as assuredly lead the British mathematicians 
to equal scientific pre-eminence, 
After the above statement, I should hope not to be accused of 
any unjust partiality for French science. Although I have endea- 
voured to do ample justice to the geometers of that country, I have 
glanced at their defects as well as their merits: both are perhaps 
characteristic of a people by whom every thing is done to excess ; 
but after all deductions, it is impossible to deny that the mathema- 
tical sciences in France have been carried to an extent never before 
known, while in England they have remained in a state of almost 
total stagnation for nearly half a eentury. 
I shall next endeavour to ascertain the causes to which we must 
6 
