transactions which are generally worth readnig. How do you manage about books? What good book on mensuration have you met with? Have you seen Bougner's mensuration of the degree in South America? I suppose Sir I's Principia to be your chief classical book after the elementary ones.
"We are all pretty well; but Charlotte will write in a day or two. All send love. Adieu, my dear boy!
It was this eagerness of the father to engage his son in the practical application of mathematics, expressed in other places as well as this, which produced the following sensible observations in reply.
"The plan of mathematical and philosophical reading pursued at Cambridge is perhaps too much confined to speculation; the intention seems to be to ground you well in the principles supposing you to apply them at leisure after your degree. In going through this course of study if I read popular treatises upon every branch, it will take up my whole time, and absolutely exclude all other kinds of reading whatever, which I should by no means wish. I think therefore it will be better for me to pursue the general courses adopted by the university, seeing the general application of everything I read without always descending to particulars.
"When I mentioned popular treatises I did not mean to refer to the books you recommended in your last letter, but to what you said in a former one, expressing a wish to see me a practical surveyor, mechanic, and navigator; a knowledge of which kind would be difficult to obtain before I took my degree, while engaged in the plan of mathematical reading adopted by the university.
"I am by no means, however, inclined to get forward without wishing to see the use and application of what I read. On the contrary I am rather remarked in college for talking of what actually exists in nature, or may be put to real practical use. With regard to the books you mentioned in your last, as it is absolutely necessary to read those which our lecturer makes use of, it is difficult to find time to apply to other tracts of the same nature, in the regular manner they deserve: particularly as many other books are required to be read during our course of lectures to be able to understand them as we ought. For instance, we have had no lectures of any consequence in algebra and fluxions, and yet a man would find himself very deficient in going through the branches of natural philosophy and Newton's Principia, without a decent knowledge of both. As I attended lectures with
the year above me, and the course only continues three years, I