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SMYTH, WILLIAM. 



SNIADECKI, JAN. 



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In 1770 however he left England again for Italy, writing on the way 

 ' The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker,' a pleasant gossiping work, 

 which has remained a favourite. " It is quite as amusing as going 

 the journey could have been ; and wo have just as good an idea of 

 what happened on the road as if we had been of the party. Humphrey 

 Clinker himself is exquisite ; and his sweetheart Winifrid Jenkins not 

 much behind him, Matthew Bramble, though not altogether original, 

 is excellently supported, and seems to have been the prototype of 

 Sir Anthony Absolute in the 'Rivals.' But Lismahago is the flower 

 of the flock. His tenaciousness in argument is not BO delightful as 

 the relaxation of his logical severity when he finds his fortune mel- 

 lowing in the wintry smiles of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble. This is the best 

 preserved and most severe of all Smollett's characters. The indecency 

 and filth in this novel are what must be allowed to all Smollett's 

 writings." (Hazlitt's ' Comic Writers,' p. 239.) 



In the neighbourhood of Leghorn he lingered through the summer 

 of 1771, and died on the 21st of October, in the fifty-first year of his 

 age. Stout, well-proportioned, and engaging in person ; cold in his 

 manners; impetuous, irritable, and unforgiving in temper; con- 

 to. ji pf nous and bitter towards all differences; hearty and loving in all 

 sympathies; proud yet mean; vain, yet generous ; of quick, versatile 

 intellect ; considerable information ; broad exuberant humour, and 

 shrewd observation such appears to have been Tobias Smollett. As 

 a novelist he stands next to Fielding as a poet he is not to be named 

 and in reference to his other works he must be looked upon as a 

 mere bookseller's hack, writing for bread, with no other object than 

 despatch. 



SMYTH, WILLIAM, was born at Liverpool in 1766, and was 

 educated at Peterhonse, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A., and 

 8th Wrangler in 1797, and M.A. in 1790. His father, who was a 

 banker, having become embarrassed in consequence of the war between 

 England and France in 1793, he was compelled to look around for 

 means of maintaining himself, and accepted the office of tutor to 

 Thomas, the eldest son of R. B. Sheridan. Of his connection with 

 these two celebrated characters Mr. Smyth has . left an interesting 

 little 'Memoir,' printed not for sale in 1840. Mr. Smyth had 

 accompanied his pupil to Cambridge, and from that time it became 

 his settled residence. In 1806 he published a small volume of poetry, 

 'English Lyrics,' of which a fifth edition was issued in 1850. In 

 1809 he was appointed Professor of Modern History, which secured 

 him a moderate competence, as the salary is 400L a year. He com- 

 menced his lectures the same year, of which the first series comprised 

 tho period from the irruption of the northern nations into the 

 dominions of the empire, to the English revolution of 1688 ; the 

 second series extended from that period to the close of the American 

 war; the third series commenced in 1810, comprised a history of the 

 French revolution from the accession of Louis XVI. to the close of 

 the Constituent Assembly; and the fourth continued it down to the 

 fall of Robespierre. To these he added in 1832, 1835, and 1837, 

 Supplementai-y Lectures, containing reflections and observations on the 

 events of that revolution, and in 1836 two others on America. The 

 whole were published in 1840, and have been since reprinted in 

 Bohn's Historical Library in 1854-5. These lectures were popular 

 during their delivery, and are well adapted for the purpose intended, 

 namely that of exciting attention to the ptudy of history, rather than as 

 satisfying all the requirements of the student ; nevertheless they con- 

 tain a useful commentary on the events : the first two series, though the 

 briefest, being perhaps the best. In 1840, was also printed for private 

 circulation, what is called an ' Occasional Lecture.' It is a pleasant 

 little pamphlet, occasioned by the desire of a lady to hear a lecture, 

 of which it takes the form. It is an eulogium on woman, displaying 

 considerable humour, with much varied reading, and is dated 1814. 

 In 1845 he published his last work, ' Evidences of Christianity,' and 

 on June 24th, 1849, he died at Norwich, after having worthily 

 occupied his professorial chair for forty years. In 1851 a painted 

 window by Warrington, representing the ' Adoration of the Magi,' was 

 erected by some of his friends to his memory in the north aisle of 

 Norwich Cathedral. 



SNELL, WILLEBRORD, a Dutch mathematician and philosopher, 

 was born in 1591, at Leyden, in the university of which city his father, 

 Rudolph Snell, the author of several scientific works, was professor of 

 mathematics. He at first applied himself to the study of the law, but 

 he very soon abandoned that pursuit, and devoted himself to the 

 mathematics. In those he early made great progress, and at seventeen 

 years of age he published an easay, in which it was attempted to 

 restore the lost treatise of Apollonius, 'De Sectione Determinata.' 

 The work is said to have possessed considerable merit, and to have 

 procured for the author a reputation among the scientific men of that 

 time, but it lost its importance upon the publication of the more 

 complete restoration by Dr. Simson. [SIMSON, ROBERT.] 



In order to acquire information relative to scientific subjects beyond 

 that which his own country afforded, Snell travelled to Germany, 

 where he obtained an introduction to Kepler. From the conversation 

 of this mathematician, during the three years of his absence from 

 home, he obtained a great accession to bis knowledge of the sciences ; 

 he appears alo to have acquired the esteem and friendship of the 

 celebrated German, and he regularly corresponded with him during 

 the rest of his life. On his return to Leyden, his father having 



resigned his post in the university, the young mathematician waa 

 immediately appointed to succeed him. From this time he applied 

 himself to the fulfilment of the duties of his professorship, to the per- 

 formance of philosophical experiments, and to the composition of the 

 works which have procured for him a high reputation among the 

 learned men on the Continent. 



His first publication was an explanation of the monetary system of 

 the ancients, which appeared at Antwerp in 1613, 8vo, under the title 

 'De Re Nummaria Liber Singularia.' His second and moat important 

 published work was entitled ' Eratosthenes Batavus de Terrse Ambitus 

 vera Quantitate a W. Snellio suscitatus ' (Leyden, 1617) : it contains 

 a description of the method of determining the magnitude of the earth 

 by trigonometrical operations, combined with the observed latitudes 

 of the stations ; and Snell has the honour of being the first who put 

 in practice a method which has since been almost always adopted by 

 those who have undertaken that great geodetical problem. He measured 

 a base line on the ground, and observed with circular instruments the 

 angles between the stations : he then by computation found the 

 length of the terrestrial arc between Alkmaar and Bergen-op-Zoom, 

 from which arc, with the difference between the observed latitudes of 

 those places, he deduced the length of a meridional arc of one degree. 

 The method possesses great advantages over the older process of 

 actually measuring th whole length of the meridional arc with rods, 

 or, as Fernel, in the beginning of the 16th century, is said to havo 

 ascertained it, by the number of revolutions made by a carriage-wheel. 

 The imperfection of the instruments employed was the cause that some 

 inaccuracies occurred in the performance of the operations; these 

 were however disco\ ered by Snell ; and it is said that he intended to 

 have given the necessary corrections in a second edition of his book, 

 but he did not live to complete them. 



He published, in 1619, a work in 4to, entitled 'Descriptio Comets} 

 qui ann. 1618 primum effulsit ; ' and two years afterwards his ' Cyclo- 

 metricus, scu de Circuli Dimensione,' in which is given an approxima- 

 tion to the value of the circumference of a circle by a method more 

 short than that of Van Keulen. His next work (1624), called 

 ' Tiphys Batavus,' constitutes a treatise on navigation ; and in 1627, 

 that is, after his death, Hortensius of Delft published his 'Doctrinse 

 Triangulorurn Canonicse Libri Quatuor/ which contains the theorems 

 of plane and spherical trigonometry, together with rules for the cal- 

 culation of sines, tangents, and secants. 



According to both Vossius and Huygens, Snell was tho first who 

 made the discovery that if a ray of light be incident on a refracting 

 surface, and be produced within the medium, the parts of the refracted 

 ray and of the produced incident ray intercepted between the point 

 where the refraction takes place and any line passing through them 

 perpendicularly to the refracting surface, have to each other a constant 

 ratio. This discovery, which is said to have been made in 1621, is no 

 other than the now well-known law between the sines of the angles of 

 incidence and refraction, which Descartes published in his ' Dioptrics,' 

 in 1637, as the result of his own researches. The experiments by 

 which Snell discovered the law were never published ; but Huygens 

 states that he had seen the manuscript containing an account of 

 them ; and Vossius relates that the heirs of Professor Hortensius 

 communicated the contents of the manuscript to Descartes. It is 

 therefore very probable that Descartes obtained the idea from 

 the works of Snell, to whom Montucla, Bossut, and most of the 

 English philosophers agree in attributing the honour of this important 

 discovery. 



After having suffered during several years from bad health, Snell 

 died, October 31, 1626, when thirty-five years of age ; his wife sur- 

 vived him only eleven days, and both of them were buried in the 

 same grave. 



SNEYDERS, FRANCIS. [SNYDERS, FRANCIS.] 



SNIADECKI, JAN, an eminent Polish astronomer and mathema- 

 tician, was born on the 29th of August 1756, at Znin, in the waywode- 

 ship of Gnesen, the son of a man of good family, who had suffered in 

 his circumstances by marrying without the consent of his mother. 

 The incidents of the early life of Sniadecki as given by his biographer 

 Balinski are interesting from tho light they throw on the state and 

 progress of education in Poland. At the school of Posen, where he 

 first studied, he distinguished himself by his attainments in rhetoric, 

 which were called into action in delivering orations at funerals and 

 on presenting a wreath to the bride at weddings, then a common 

 custom with the students. His attainments attracted the attention 

 of the Jesuits, as did those of every youth of promise in Poland, and 

 when in 1772 he left Posen for the university of Cracow, some 

 Jesuits joined him on the road and invited him to lodge in their 

 convent at the end of his journey, besieging him with solicitations to 

 enter their order, to which they knew that his father had an unusually 

 strong aversion. The professors at the university lent him willing 

 aid to extricate himself from their toils, and he shook himself loose. 

 It was then the practice for the students to compose Latin speeches 

 on some attractive subject such, for instance, as the miraculous 

 migration of the house of Loretto commit them to memory and 

 deliver them in the streets or public places, where they were listened 

 to in respectful silence, " while," says Balinski, writing after 1830, 

 "they would now be greeted with laughter." Sniadecki, who among 

 his other accomplishments, had the whole of Horace by heart, became 



