thers,--sometimes, I think, very justly. There is a curious phrase which
occurs more than once. When he wants to say that something or other was
done before Simson or another was born, he says "before he existed, at
least as an author." He seems to reserve the possibility of Simson's
_pre-existence_, but at the same time to assume that he never wrote
anything in his previous state. Tell me that Simson pre-existed in any
other way than as editor of some pre-existent Euclid? Tell Apella![528]

1810. In this year Jean Wood, Professor of Mathematics in the University of
Virginia (Richmond),[529] addressed a printed circular to "Dr. Herschel,
Astronomer, Greenwich Observatory." No mistake was more common than the
natural one of imagining that the _Private Astronomer_ of the king was the
_Astronomer Royal_. The letter was on the {234} difference of velocities of
the two sides of the earth, arising from the composition of the rotation
and the orbital motion. The _paradox_ is a fair one, and deserving of
investigation; but, perhaps it would not be easy to deduce from it tides,
trade-winds, aerolithes, &c., as Mr. Wood thought he had done in a work
from which he gives an extract, and which he describes as published. The
composition of rotations, &c., is not for the world at large: the paradox
of the non-rotation of the moon about her axis is an instance. How many
persons know that when a wheel rolls on the ground, the lowest point is
moving upwards, the highest point forwards, and the intermediate points in
all degrees of betwixt and between? This is too short an explanation, with
some good difficulties.

The Elements of Geometry. In 2 vols. [By the Rev. J. Dobson,[530] B.D.]
Cambridge, 1815. 4to.

Of this unpunctuating paradoxer I shall give an account in his own way: he
would not stop for any one; why should I stop for him? It is worth while to
try how unpunctuated sentences will read.

The reverend J Dobson BD late fellow of saint Johns college Cambridge was
rector of Brandesburton in Yorkshire he was seventh wrangler in 1798 and
died in 1847 he was of that sort of eccentricity which permits account of
his private life if we may not rather say that in such cases private life
becomes public there is a tradition that he was called Death Dobson on
account of his head and aspect of countenance being not very unlike the
ordinary pictures of a human skull his mode of life is reported to have
been very singular wheneve