A Memoir of Charles Hutton Author:John Bruce Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Lord Chancellor and also Lady Eldon. So fully occupied he must then have been, that one cannot help feeling surprised at the following notice at the end of one o... more »f his advertisements: " Any schoolmasters, in town or country, who are desirous of improvement in any branch of the mathematics, by applying to Mr. Hutton, may be instructed during the Christmas vacation." The success, which Mr. Hutton met with on the publication of his Mensuration, may be judged of, from the very numerous list of subscribers—a list very seldom equalled in provincial publications. The work is dedicated to his Grace the Duke of Northumberland. As it is pleasant to trace the first steps by which men rise to eminence, I stop here merely to observe, that our celebrated townsman, Bewick, at this time an apprentice with Mr. Beilby, commenced his career as a wood-engraver, by engraving the mathematical diagrams for . Hutton's Mensuration. As this was the work in which Mr. H. first eminently distinguished himself as a mathematician, it will be proper to give a more particular account of it, and in doing this I gladly avail myself of the pen of Dr. Gregory.— " At the time when Mr. H. commenced this undertaking, the books on mensuration that were generally used in seminaries of education were those of Hawney and Robertson. Of these, the first contained some attempts at theory, but exhibited in so inelegant and inaccurate a manner as to render the volume altogether useless. Robertson's work was neat and correct, but limited in its nature, being confined altogether to the exhibition ofpractical rules and examples. There had been, it is true, from the time of Wallis and Huygens, and especially since the invention of the fluxional analysis, a variety of disquisitions and investigations relative to rectificat...« less