st, or at least talked atheism: it
would be easy to prove him either one thing or the other from his writings.
His lively sallies on this subject much amused the Empress, and all the
younger part of her Court. But some of the older courtiers suggested that
it was hardly prudent to allow such unreserved exhibitions. The Empress
thought so too, but did not like to muzzle her guest by an express
prohibition: so a plot was contrived. The scorner was informed that an
eminent mathematician had an algebraical proof of the existence of God,
which he would communicate before the whole Court, if agreeable. Diderot
gladly consented. The mathematician, who is not named, was Euler.[636] He
came to Diderot with the gravest air, and in a tone of perfect conviction
said, "_Monsieur!_

(a + b^n)/n = x

_donc Dieu existe; repondez!_"[637] Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew,
though this is expressed in a very roundabout way by Thiebault--and whom we
may suppose to have expected some verbal argument of alleged algebraical
closeness, was disconcerted; while peals of laughter sounded on all sides.
Next day he asked permission to return to France, which was granted. An
algebraist would have {340} turned the tables completely, by saying,
"Monsieur! vous savez bien que votre raisonnement demande le developpement
de x suivant les puissances entieres de n".[638] Goldsmith could not have
seen the anecdote, or he might have been supposed to have drawn from it a
hint as to the way in which the Squire demolished poor Moses.

The _graphomath_ is a person who, having no mathematics, attempts to
describe a mathematician. Novelists perform in this way: even Walter Scott
now and then burns his fingers. His dreaming calculator, Davy Ramsay,
swears "by the bones of the immortal Napier." Scott thought that the the
philomaths worshiped relics: so they do, in one sense. Look into
Hutton's[639] Dictionary for _Napier's Bones_, and you shall learn all
about the little knick-knacks by which he did multiplication and division.
But never a bone of his own did he contribute; he preferred elephants'
tusks. The author of _Headlong Hall_[640] makes a grand error, which is
quite high science: he says that Laplace proved the precession of the
equinoxes to be a periodical inequality. He should have said the variation
of the obliquity. But the finest instance is the following: Mr.
Warren,[641] in his well-wrought tale of the martyr-philosopher, was
incautious enough t