Repertor_, that is, the Finder of the Rosary,
one of the titles of Hobbes's mathematical discoveries. Wallis asserts
that this R. R. may still serve, for it may answer his own book,
"Roseti Refutator, or, the Refuter of the Rosary."

Poor Hobbes gave up the contest reluctantly; if, indeed, the
controversy may not be said to have lasted all his life. He
acknowledges he was writing to no purpose; and that the medicine was
obliged to yield to the disease.

Sed nil profeci, magnis authoribus Error
Fultus erat, cessit sic Medicina malo.

He seems to have gone down to the grave, in spite of all the
reasonings of the geometricians on this side of it, with a firm
conviction that its superficies had both depth and thickness.[386]
Such were the fruits of a great genius, entering into a province out
of his own territories; and, though a most energetic reasoner, so
little skilful in these new studies, that he could never know when he
was confuted and refuted.[387]

FOOTNOTES:

[380] The origin of his taste for mathematics was purely accidental:
begun in love, it continued to dotage. According to Aubrey, he
was forty years old when, "being in a gentleman's library,
Euclid's Elements lay open at the 47th Propos. lib. i., which,
having read, he swore 'This is impossible!' He read the
demonstration, which referred him back to another--at length
he was convinced of that truth. This made him in love with
geometry. I have heard Mr. Hobbes say that he was wont to draw
lines on his thighs and on the sheets a-bed."

[381] The author of the excellent Latin grammar of the English
language, so useful to every student in Europe, of which work
that singular patriot, Thomas Hollis, printed an edition, to
present to all the learned Institutions of Europe. Henry
Stubbe, the celebrated physician of Warwick, to whom the
reader has been introduced, joined, for he loved a quarrel, in
the present controversy, when it involved philosophical
matters, siding with Hobbes, because he hated Wallis. In his
"Oneirocritica, or an Exact Account of the Grammatical Parts
of this Controversy," he draws a strong character of Wallis,
who was indeed a great mathematician, and one of the most
extraordinary decypherers of letters; for perhaps no new
system of character could be invented for whi