TRANSACTIONS. 
59 
Surrounded with machinery, with the rich elements of me¬ 
chanics in their most attractive forms, we should have imagined 
that a taste for mechanical combinations would have exclusive¬ 
ly prevailed ; and that inquiries locked up in the deep, and to 
them unapproachable, recesses of Plato, Pappus, Apollonius, 
and Euclid, would have met with but few cultivators. On the 
contrary, Porisms and Loci, Sections of Ratio and of Space, 
Inclinations and Tangencies,—subjects confined among the 
ancients to the very greatest minds, were here familiar to men 
whose condition in life was, to say the least, most unpropitious 
for the successful prosecution of such elevated and profound 
pursuits. 
“ The contrast also between the Northern and Southern 
parts of England, in this particular, was most remarkable. In 
the latter the torch of geometry emitted hut a feeble ray ; 
while in the former it existed in its purest and most splendid 
form. The two great restorers of the ancient geometry, Ma¬ 
thew Stewart and Robert Simson, it may be observed, lived in 
Scotland. Did their proximity encourage the growth of this 
spirit? or were their writings cultivated by some teacher of a 
village school, who communicated by a method, which genius 
of a transcendental order knows so well how to employ, a taste 
for these sublime inquiries, so that at length they gradually 
worked their way to the anvil and the loom? ” 
TUESDAY EVENING. 
Mr. Abraham delivered a Lecture on Magnetism, and par¬ 
ticularly described several useful applications of this science, 
which he had employed for the advantage of the arts. He 
exhibited the model of a machine used for needle pointing , the 
labouring at which has been found so prejudicial to health, 
owing to the particles of steel inhaled during the process, that 
although the men were employed at it only six hours in the 
day, few ever attained the age of forty years, most dying at 
thirty or thirty-five, and several not surviving twenty-five. 
These deadly effects had been in a great measure obviated by 
Mr. Abraham’s contrivance of placing several magnets around 
a mouth-piece, to attract the particles of steel as they came off* 
in the process of grinding, or floated in the dusty atmosphere 
of the small apartments. This invention, for which the Society 
of Arts awarded their large gold medal, has not been so uni¬ 
versally employed in the manufactories as its importance de¬ 
served, owing partly to the disinclination of the workmen to 
adopt methods which, by rendering their avocation less inju¬ 
rious to health, should lower the price of their labour. 
