Q/53 



TO 



THOMAS STEPHENS DAVIES, ESQ. F.R.S. L.&E. 



Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. 



MY DEAR SIR, 



I claim the privilege of inscribing this book to 

 you, because, as my first public effort in literature, it is 

 whether good for anything or not the most sincere present 

 I can make to my best and most valued friend. 



It may seem rather irrelevant to the purposes of a dedica- 

 tion, if I allude to the early mathematics of your own country. 

 It may not be generally known, that many of the men of 

 science who adorned the walls of the University of Oxford 

 in the middle ages, were Welchmen : and I mention this, 

 because the title of a work lately announced has excited a 

 question relative to the existence of materials requisite for 

 writing a history of the early progress of science in that 

 principality. I am not surprised at the question when I take 

 into consideration, that a man or rather a boy who arro- 

 gates to himself the title of the Welch mathematical repre- 

 sentative of England, once said in the dining-hall of my own 

 College, when a dispute about Demoivre's theorem had 

 arisen, that *' he thought Demoivre a very clever man, having 



