to take the pure and exalted doctrines of the Christian philosophy, and put them into the mouths of narrow-minded, barbarous, bigotted, malicious, illiterate Musulmen, by supposing them to talk and moralize in the superior strain of a well-informed Christian; and to invigorate their speech with the powers of learning, like classical scholars who have studied oratory and elegance all their lives; though the Turk is a professed enemy to literature. This plan exposes us to another inconvenience; that if we speak in character, we must speak with veneration of the religion of Mahomet, and call it our most holy faith; and the impostor who invented it must be our holy prophet; which though it is but fiction, yet such is the weakness of the human mind, and the force of custom, that we may tell lies, or hear them told, till we believe them; and speak respectfully of Mahomet, till we think but meanly of the Gospel. The Adventurer has great merit as a work of moral instruction and entertainment, and may be read with great advantage by young persons who would be aware of the ways of the world, and the snares that are laid to ruin innocence: in many respects the Adventurer is superior to the Spectator, and the author seems

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to have written with an excellent intention: but he has too frequently indulged that idle humour of laying his scenes upon Turkish ground, and conveying his precepts in Turkish attire.

The lives of men famous in their generation, as saints, martyrs, scholars, philosophers, soldiers; and of those who were singularly in famous, as impostors, thieves, murderers, ty rants, usurpers, &c. if faithfully represented, will instruct while they entertain, and exhibit good and evil in their true colours, to much better effect than the thin-spun long-winded letters of Richardson, the incoherent ramblings of Sterne, or the low scenes of Smollett, &c. which leave behind them but little worth re taining.

LETTER VI.

ON THE USE OF MATHEMATICAL LEARNING.

A YOUNG member of the university of Oxford being directed by his tutor to the study of Euclid's Elements with the rest of his class, remonstrated against it to his companions as a useless undertaking: "What," said he," does the man think my father intends me for a carpenter?" Many other scholars of more wit than experience are under the same mistake: they think the mathematical sciences are of no benefit, but to those who are to make either a practical or a professional use of them. It must be owned, that their application to the business of life is chiefly in mechanics, astronomy, navigation, perspective, the military arts of fortifying and attacking of places, surveying of land, and the like. And where would be the harm, if a gentleman of fortune, who has leisure to know every thing, should know some of these things? But the use of mathematical learning is by no means confined to practical arts and necessary computations: it is eminently serviceable

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viceable to improve and strengthen the intellectual faculties, and render them more fit for every kind of speculation. Geometry is a sort of logic, wherein quantities are the objects of argumentation: and the method of arguing is so strict, that the order of a demonstration cannot be followed without that unremitting attention, which when it once becomes habitual to the mind, will be transferred to all other subjects. The memory will be better able on every occasion to assist the judgment in comparing what went before with what comes after, and thence deducing a conclusion with precision. Logic teaches the art of deducing some third proposition from the comparison of two others in a syllogism: but a geometrical demonstration being frequently a scries of such syllogisms, habituates the understanding to a more orderly arrangement of complicated ideas; for if the order is broken the proof is deficient. Method is of the first importance in all subjects, to give a discourse the two excellencies of force and perspicuity; and no practice is so proper to communicate this art of methodizing as the forms of reasoning in geometry. We have a remarkable instance of the efficacy of this practice in the theological writings of Dr. Barrow, to whose

skill in geometry it may be imputed in great measure, that he has divided and disposed his subjects with so much art and judgment, as to exhaust their matter, and render them intelligible in every part.

But even to omit this analogical use of geometry, the science is necessary in itself to give an understanding of many things, which ought to be known by men of a liberal education. Geography can be understood but very imperfectly without it: and the arts of projection, which teach us how to represent the face of the world in perspective, are as entertaining as they are useful. Every curious mind must be delighted with the operations of trigonometry; which enables us to measure with certainty such quantities and distances as are inaccessible: which to an ignorant person seems impossible, as if there were some magic in the work: but it is the general object of all mathematical reasoning, from known quantities to find others that are unknown, by means of certain relations subsisting between them.

There is scarcely any thing in nature more wonderful to a contemplative person, and more worthy to be studied, than the effect of certain proportions in the theory of music, which

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