SIMSON. 133 



sufficient commentary upon the great abuse likely to 

 flow from vesting the patronage of a professorship in 

 the colleagues of the teacher. I have known a profes- 

 sor's son appointed to the same chair, with few or no 

 mathematical acquirements, because his father was 

 much and justly respected among the members of the 

 academical body. The same thing could not happen 

 in Edinburgh, where the Crown or the magistrates 

 have the patronage of all the professorships excepting 

 one, and that is in the representative of the founder.* 

 Simson repaired accordingly to London, where he 

 became intimately acquainted, among others, with 

 Jones the optician, with Henry Ditton of Christ's 

 Hospital, under whose tuition he placed himself, with 

 Carswell, above all, with Edmund Halley, then a cap- 

 tain in the Navy, afterwards so celebrated as Dr. 

 Halley ; of whom he used to assert that " he had never 

 known any other man of so acute and penetrating an 

 understanding, and of so pure a taste." From him he 

 received much personal kindness, and what he had 

 reason to value still more, the advice to prosecute his 

 study of the Ancient Geometry, and attempt restoring 

 its lost books. Halley made him a present of his copy 

 of Pappus, with notes in his own hand. But though 

 these accidental circumstances tended to direct his 

 attention towards the scrupulous rigour as well as sur- 

 passing elegance of the Greek methods, it is a great 

 mistake to suppose that he objected to the strictness 

 of the modern analysis as inadequate. That he deemed 

 its beauty inferior, and that he was right in so deem- 

 ing, is certain ; but that he questioned the solidity of 

 its foundations is wholly untrue. Not only did he al- 

 ways explain its principles to his pupils, though in a 

 manner peculiar to himself, but he has left behind him 

 a treatise demonstrating the fundamental laws of the 

 calculus, and we now possess it in a printed form. 



* Agriculture, in the Pulteney FamHy. 



