Sill JOSEPH BANKS. 371 



intrigue which he set on foot, and the ferment which he ex- 

 cited in the bosom of the Society, without any victory what- 

 ever being gained for mathematical and physical science. 

 His writings had never placed him higher than a mere 

 " amateur," and a somewhat " feeble amateur" in all 

 essentials, though stout enough in the overbearing lan- 

 guage of his polemical writings, and magniloquent enough 

 in the diction of his self-laudatory prefaces. Some of 

 his efforts are merely puerile, like the Sieve of Erato- 

 sthenes, which he tried, he says, "Dm propitiis usus;" 

 some are far too easy to confer any fame, like the 

 restoration of Apollonius's Inclinations; while his great 

 attempt, an edition of Newton, is confessed by all to be 

 as signal a failure as any on record in the history of 

 science. * 



* The reader who compares Bishop Horsley's praises of his own 

 exploits with the exploits themselves, will readily concur in Pro- 

 fessor Playfair's opinion of them expressed delicately but sharply 

 in the fourth volume of the ' Edinburgh Review.' He has not 

 indeed entered into particulars, as to the great failure, the 

 1 Newton/ But who can read an edition of the ( Principia,' the 

 < Optics/ and the ' Fluxions/ published in 1778 80, and not marvel 

 at the author's apparent ignorance of all that had been done since 

 Sir I. Newton's time ? There is not a word of the Calculus of 

 Variations or of Partial Differences, not an allusion to D' Alembert's 

 principle of Dynamics, nor to the objection of the Bernouillis and 

 D' Alembert, touching the Hydraulic Cataract j no reference to the 

 progress of Hydrodynamical science ; nor to the discoveries of Dol- 

 lond and others on refraction. Indeed the ' Optics' is given almost 

 without note or comment, while the comments on the ( Principia ' 

 are only upon passages of no difficulty, leaving the darker ones in 

 their original obscurity, unless where reference is made to the com- 

 mentary of Le Sueur and Jacquier, Vargnon and Herman and the 

 Bernouillis are unnoticed. In short no one can read the book, 

 however cursorily, and rise from its perusal with the least respect 



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