t give
it back. This was repeated by Sherburne,[482] in 1675, who speaks of the
work, which "being communicated to Mersennus was, by some perfidious
acquaintance of that honest-minded person, surreptitiously taken from him,
and irrecoverably lost or suppressed, to the unspeakable detriment of the
lettered world." Now let the {296} reader look through the dictionaries of
the last century and the present, scientific or general, at the article,
"Vieta," and he will be amused with the constant recurrence of
"honest-minded" Mersenne, and his "surreptitious" acquaintance. We cannot
have seen less than thirty copies of these epithets.

REVIEW OF MACCLESFIELD LETTERS.

October 18, 1862. _Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth
Century, in the Collection of the Earl of Macclesfield._[483] 2 vols.
(Oxford, University Press.)

Though the title-page of this collection bears the date 1841, it is only
just completed by the publication of its Table of Contents and Index.
Without these, a work of the kind is useless for consultation, and cannot
make its way. The reason of the delay will appear: its effect is well known
to us. We have found inquirers into the history of science singularly
ignorant of things which this collection might have taught them.

In the same year, 1841, the Historical Society of Science, which had but a
brief existence, published a collection of letters, eighty-three in number,
edited by Mr. Halliwell,[484] of English men of science, which dovetails
with the one before us, and is for the most part of a prior date. The two
should be bound up together. The smaller collection runs from 1562 to 1682;
the larger, from 1606 to past 1700. We shall speak of the two as the Museum
collection and the Macclesfield collection. And near them should be placed,
in every scientific library, the valuable collection published, by Mr.
Edleston,[485] for Trinity College, in 1850.

{297}

The history of these letters runs back to famous John Collins, the
attorney-general of the mathematics, as he has been called, who wrote to
everybody, heard from everybody, and sent copies of everybody's letter to
everybody else. He was in England what Mersenne[486] was in France: as
early as 1671, E. Bernard[487] addresses him as "the very Mersennus and
intelligence of this age." John Collins[488] was never more than accountant
to the Excise Office, to which he was promoted from teaching writing and
ciphering, at th