94 HISTORY OF MECHANICS. 



space appeared to him, as they have appeared to 

 many of his followers, to be a more clear and satis- 

 factory road to knowledge, than the operations of 

 symbolical language. Hermann, whose Phorono- 

 mia was the next great work on this subject, pur- 

 sued a like course; employing curves, which he 

 calls " the scale of velocities," " of forces," &c. 

 Methods nearly similar were employed by the two 

 first Bernoullis, and other mathematicians of that 

 period ; and were, indeed, so long familiar, that the 

 influence of them may still be traced in some of the 

 terms which are used on such subjects; as, for 

 instance, when we talk of "reducing a problem to 

 quadratures," that is, to the finding the area of the 

 curves employed in these methods. 



2. Analytical Mechanics. Enter. As analysis 

 was more cultivated, it gained a predominancy over 

 geometry; being found to be a far more powerful 

 instrument for. obtaining results; and possessing a 

 beauty and an evidence, which, though different 

 from those of geometry, had great attractions for 

 minds to which they became familiar. The person 

 who did most to give to analysis the generality and 

 symmetry which are now its pride, was also the 

 person who made Mechanics analytical; I mean 

 Euler. He began his execution of this task in 

 various memoirs which appeared in the Transac- 

 tions of the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg!^ 

 commencing with its earliest volumes; and in 1736, 

 he published there his Mechanics, or the Science 



