123 



Prop on an inclined Plane. 



[April 



what more clearly made out. Perhaps " A Miner" will favour 

 me (and I think many of your Subscribers will thank him) by 

 revising his paper. I must touch upon the first solution, be- 

 cause that to my reckoning is clear enough to be palpably 

 wrong. When P : W : : B C ; A C— if A C and W are con- 

 stant, P will be greatest when B C is the greatest. Suppose, 

 Mr. Editor, we said 2 : 4 : : 6 : 12, if 4 and 12 remain con- 

 stant, surely 2 and 6 must increase and decrease together as 

 long as the proportion lasts. Else we should perhaps have 

 1: 4 : :7: 12 ; and that will never do. In fact I should 

 say from the body of this solution it would appear P is greatest 

 when P C comes into the vertical position ; which just suits 

 my fancy, that a vertical pressure is best resisted by a, verti- 

 cal prop. 



Your obedient servant, 



A would be Mathematician. 



To the Editor of the Madras Journal 



of Science and Literature* 



Sir, 



I beg to return you my thanks for the early perusal of a 

 letter, signed " A toovld-he Mathematician" containing 

 strictures on the two problems regarding the best position of 

 a prop on an inclined plane, which I had the honour to send 

 you some time ago. The writer says, " fancying myself a 

 " bit of a Mathematician" &c. &c. e * I was disappointed to 

 (e find, in the second figure, so many lines and letters quite 

 " unnoticed in the solution of the problem, and still more to 

 " find, the line A C not in the figure, at all." Now A C is 

 not requisite, and had the critic been in reality what he 

 * fancies' himself to be, or had he read with other motive than 

 to cavil, he must have immediately observed that A C should 

 have been printed A G, and verily the only line unnoticed is 

 P N, which I ' fancied 5 was inserted in the manuscript sent 

 to you, agreeably to the copy I had received, and from which 

 I did not conceive myself justified to depart. However P N 

 happens to be immaterial ; for whether it be written as the 

 Journal shows it " let s and c represent the sine and cosine 



