animal of extinct
race, an Eton mathematician. Few Eton men, even of the minority which knows
what a sliding rule is, are aware that the inventor was of their own school
and college: but they may be excused, for Dr. Hutton,[553] so far as his
Dictionary bears witness, seems not to have known it any more than they. A
glance at one of his letters reminds us of a letter from the Astronomer
Royal on the discovery of Neptune, which we printed March 20, 1847. Mr.
Airy[554] there contends, and proves it both by Leverrier[555] and by
Adams,[556] that the limited publication of a private letter is more
efficient than the more general publication of a printed memoir. The same
may be true of a dead letter, as opposed to a dead book. Our eye was caught
by a letter of Oughtred (1629), containing systematic use of contractions
for the words _sine_, _cosine_, etc., prefixed to the symbol of the angle.
This is so very important a step, simple as it is, that Euler[557] is
justly held to have greatly advanced trigonometry by its introduction.
Nobody that we know of has noticed that Oughtred was master of the
improvement, and willing to have taught it, if people would have learnt.
After looking at his dead letter, we naturally turned to his dead book on
trigonometry, and there we found the abbreviations _s_, _sco_, _t_, _tco_,
_se_, _seco_, regularly established as part of the system of the work. But
not one of those who have investigated the contending claims of Euler and
Thomas {304} Simpson[558] has chanced to know of Oughtred's
"Trigonometrie": and the present revival is due to his letter, not to his
book.

A casual reader, turning over the pages, would imagine that almost all the
letters had been printed, either in the General Dictionary, or in
Birch,[559] etc.: so often does the supplementary remark begin with "this
letter has been printed in ----." For ourselves we thought, until we
counted, that a large majority of the letters had been given, either in
whole or in part. But the positive strikes the mind more forcibly than the
negative: we find that all of which any portion has been in type makes up
very little more than a quarter; the cases in which the whole letter is
given being a minority of this quarter. The person who has been best
ransacked is Flamsteed: of 36 letters from him, 34 had been previously
given in whole or in part. Of 59 letters to and from Newton, only 17 have
been culled.

The letters have been modernized in