706 PHILOSOPHICAL TBANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1712. 



penis; and 5 more he could not get rid of without the assistance of Mr. S. 

 Pollard, an ingenious surgeon; who by an incision made way for them, as they 

 came severally near the glans. Whenever one of these large stones broke out, 

 there was a crack within his body, as if the sphincter muscle, or bladder itself, 

 was rent. This patient being opened after death, there were found in the top 

 of his bladder, which was contracted like a purse, two prodigious large stones, 

 one especially which I measured, was rather more than 3^ inches one way, and 

 4 the other; it weighed 2 ounces, wanting 3 drachms; the other seems lighter, 

 and weighs but 1 drachm above an ounce. There were two very odd stones 

 taken out of the right kidney, the left was wholly degenerated into a kind of 

 mucilage ; and between the neck of the bladder and the end of the penis, which 

 was mortified thereby, were lodged no less than half a dozen stones. There was 

 little moisture left in the bladder, the ureters being broken off, and almost 

 wholly consumed. 



Concerning the Ascent of IVater between two Glass Planes, By Mr. Brook 



Taylor* W 336, p. 538. 



I fastened together two pieces of glass, as flat as I could get : so that they 

 were inclined in an angle of about 24- degrees. I then set them in water, with 

 the contiguous edges perpendicular. The upper part of the water, by rising 

 between them, made the hyperbola, fig. 10, pi. ]/, as I copied it from the 

 glass. I have examined it as well as I can, and it seems to approach very near 

 to the common hyperbola. But my apparatus was not nice enough to discover 

 this exactly. The perpendicular assymptote was exactly determined by the edge 

 of the glass; but the horizontal one I could not so well discover. 



Bifrons, near Canterbury, June 25, \7\'l. 



' Brook Taylor, a very able mathematician, and secretary of the Royal Society, was bom at Ed- 

 monton, in Middlesex, in l685. In 1701 he entered St. John's College, Cambridge^ and in 1708, 

 wrote his tract on the Centre of Oscillation. In 1709 he took the degree of Bachelor of Laws, and 

 in 1712 was elected into the Royal Society, of which he was chosen secretary two years after, and 

 the same year took his degree of LL.D. Dr. Taylor had many excellent papers on philosophy and 

 mathematics, inserted in the Philos. Trans, from vol. 27 to vol. 32, inclusively) besides which, he 

 published some other excellent works, viz. Methodus Incrementorum, in 4to. 1715, containing 

 many excellent tracts, particularly a curious theorem on the manner of expressing a variable quantity 

 by all the orders of its differentials or fluxions ; also the problem of the vibrations of a tense cord, 

 of which he gave the first solution. The same year also came out his Principles of Linear Perspec- 

 tive, first establishing the true practice of that art, on principles which have been ever since followed 

 by all succeeding authors. Dr. Taylor was a profound and elegant mathematician of the old school of 

 Newton, Jones, Cotes, &c. and one of the chief writers in the disputes with the Bemoullis and 

 other eminent mathematicians on the Continent Bat died at an early age, 46, in the year 1731. 



