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The arrangement is happy; it was indicated, indeed, by the text Tim. iv. 7, 8.) I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of rightcousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing. This glorious illustration, we had almost said this sufficient proof, of the divine nature of Christianity, displays the satisfactory retrospect, and the delightful prospect, of a Christian and a minister, on closing a life devoted to the glory of his Master. The first part represents the Christian life under the figures of severe conflict, unremitted exertion, and strict fidelity to a sacreà trust. The second is considered, less distinctly, as describing the nature of the reward, the giver, and the general assurance of it to all the people of God.

The memoir notices Mr. M.'s indications of talent in early youth, his juvenile dissipations, the circumstance by which he was led to serious reflection, and the decided change effected in his heart and character, by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. Having declined the advice which recommended him to go to college for the purpose of entering the established church, partly from some insuperable scruples, and partly from pecuniary objections, he went through a course of private instruction for the ministry, and was shortly afterwards settled over an Independent church at Warwick, where he laboured with great success for twenty-five years, the congregation increasing in that time from about fifty, to seven or eight hundred. For a number of years, he had been accustomed annually to supply the Tabernacles of London and Bristol for a certain period. In consequence of extreme official exertions, on July 6th, 1806, he suffered a paralytic stroke on the following day, and, after lingering till the 20th Nov. quitted the scene of his honourable and successful toils, at the age of fifty years. The state of his feelings, during this solemn period of about four months, is narrated with some minuteness, and will be considered with lively interest by every serious reader. He seems to have been, in all respects, well intitled to appropriate the exulting declaration of St. Paul,--to look backward on his journey with grateful complacency, and forward to his rest with assured expectation.

*** A second edition of this sermon, we find, will soon be published.

Art. XXVI. The Juvenile Preceptor; or, a Course of Moral and Scientific Instructions. Vol. I. containing Spelling and Reading Lessons, not exceeding one Syllable; Vol. II. containing Spelling Lessons, from two to seven. Syllables, with appropriate Moral Tales and Poems; the use of Points and Explanations of other Characters which occur in books. pp. 348. price 5s. Foughnill. G. Nicholson. London. Symonds.

1805.

THE compiler of this work has formed a design of supplying a course of

liberal amusement and instruction for the young. He proposes, in the progress of his labours," not only to intermix the maxims of experience and wisdom with the incidents of early life; to inculcate the principles of humility, gratitude, sincerity, justice, sympathy, liberality, patience, temperance, honour, magnanimity, industry, and perseverance; but to display the elements of general qualifications for active life; as reading, elocution, English grammar, arithmetic, bock-keeping, mathematics, and

short-hand also the rudiments of those branches of science which unite useful knowledge with pleasing amusement," &c.

Such is the literary entertainment which is providing to gratify the mental appetites of the rising generation; and, as is usual in a family, the caterer has first attended to the wants of infant minds. He has certainly taken pains to make this dish as palatable, and at the same time as nourishing as possible, to those for whom it is designed. There are some advantages arising from his plan, which" commences with the easiest and simplest combinations of letters," and is the most regularly progressive, that we have seen. To save time in teaching the art of reading, the words are classified by the sounds of the vowels. We know not what will be said by such school-mistresses as Shenstone has celebrated, when, in counting the letters of the alphabet, they find twenty-nine instead of twenty

81X.

If such revolutions begin at the horn-book, the fountain of science, will not the whole world be shortly turned upside down? Το us it seems that ke and je have no sound, when used in spelling, difterent from ka and ja, and as k and j could not be introduced into the place of hard and g soft, without too great a confusion, the reformation was unnecessary. We hope, however, there will be no uproar is directed to be called kwe; w, we; z, in the schools, when ze; as these are the most natural sounds of the letters that have been so long disgraced with a nick-name; and perhaps hah is the best method of pronouncing the aspirate h

Some errors of the press, and a few grammatical blunders, are met with in these volumes, which should be carefully avoided in a future edition : we particularly notice the verb bid, because it is twice used by mistake when the past tense of the verb was required. Vol. I. pp. 108 and 122.

We

The poetry is too lame, in many places, for the use even of children in their first lessons; and some alterations are made in the easy and simple verses of Dr. Watts, by which, whatever else is improved, their poetry is not. are aware that many of these alterations, and other defects of the poetry, were necessary, to make them lessons of one or two syllables; but we would rather have children confined to prose lessons, than taught such doggrels as these:

I with my book will spend my day,

And not with such e'er dwell,-
And one bad sheep in time is sure

To mar e'en all the fold.

Or look at the birds in the trees, not in cage.

In his preface to the second volume, the author says, • We have avoided giving our young friends any controverted bias;' and in order to this, it seems, he thought it necessary to keep every thing peculiar to Christianity out of sight. Its morals, indeed, he commends, Vol. II. p. 232; but, in the next page, we find a prayer, in which there is not the least allusion to Jesus Christ; though he has said of himself, I am the way-no man cometh unto the Father but by me:' and though we are invited to come boldly to the throne of Grace, because he ever liveth to make intercession.

As we think this a useful and judicious undertaking, we wish to see it sas complete as possible, and earnestly recommend the author to consider, VOL. III.

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whether children, among other good things, may not learn something about that kindest friend of theirs, who said, suffer little children to come unto me.' Let him not interfere with religion at all, if he thinks it best to exclude from his work every thing purely evangelical.

Art. XXVII. Scenes for the Young; or, Pleasing Tales, calculated to promote Good Manners, and the Love of Virtue. 24mo. pp. 124. Price 1s. 6d. Darton and Co. 1807.

IT has so often been our lot to see, in the little amusing narratives intended for young children, the most absurd prejudices, and the grossest errors especially on moral topics, that we feel a peculiar pleasure on occalons for conferring praise, in this department of our critical examinations. These tales are correct aud useful in point of moral tendency; they are also written with care and intelligence. We would encourage the same au thor to resume his pen, advising him constantly to keep in view the deve lopement of some useful maxim, and also the introduction of some interesting information. The first tale of the four, though the least pleasing and studied, would have accomplished this object the best, if it had not been left strangely deficient and abrupt at the conclusion.

SWEDISH LITERATURE.

Art. XXVIII. Exposition des Operations faites en Lapponie. A Detail of the Operations carried on in Lapland for the measurement of an Are of the Meridian, in 1801, 1802, and 1803; by Messrs. Ofverboom, Svanberg, Holmquist and Palander. Compiled by Jons Svanberg, &c. Published by the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm. 8vo. pp. 230.

Stockholm.

A KNOWLEDGE of the figure and magnitude of the globe on which we live, has in all ages, as M. Svanberg justly observes, been an ob ject of human curiosity. But few, comparatively, are aware of the extreme difficulty of the undertaking, or know, that, notwithstanding this problem has exercised the ingenuity of the greatest mathematicians and astronomers, from the first dawn of science to the present time, it has never yet been completely solved. We feel pleasure in being able exclusively to lay be fore our readers an account of some recent measurements in Lapland; and take the opportunity of sketching historically the progress which has been made in this branch of Geometry.

The earliest attempt of which we have any distinct account, is that made by Eratosthenes, about two hundred years before the birth of Christ § which, considering the time when it was undertaken, appears to have been executed with great accuracy. Eratosthenes, however, seems to have confined his operations, to the mere determination of the magnitude of the earth, without any inquiry into its figure, which he presupposed a perfect aphere. And indeed this appears to have been the case, in every subse quent operation, before the invention of the telescope and pendulum clock. By means of the former, the figure of the planet Jupiter was found to differ materially from that of a sphere, and experience shewed that the vibrations of the latter, were slowest under the equator, and quicker in latitudes more and more approaching to the poles. These two circumstances combined, first suggested to Mr. Huyghens, the idea that

our earth, like Jupiter, was of a spheroidal form, and like that planet flattest at the poles. This similarity of figure in bodies so much alike in other respects, might naturally be supposed to arise from the same cause, namely their rotatory motion. For in every body revolving round a determinate axis, those parts which are farthest distant from it must necessarily move more rapidly, than those which are nearer. This increase of velocity, by increasing the centrifugal force, produces an elongation of those parts, and this in a greater or lesser degree, as the motion is more or less rapid. Viewing the earth then as a plastic body, all that remained to be done, was to determine the proportion, which the force of gravity bore, to the centrifugal force, at each particular point, in order to determine the figure which must necessarily result from their combination. In this manner did Mr. Huyghens calculate the diameter of our earth at the poles, to be to its di ameter at the,equator as 578 to 579 nearly.

But the calculation of Mr. Huyghens was erroneous, from his having supposed the force of gravity to reside only in the centre of the earth, whereas it is diffused throughout every part of our globe. The great Newton, therefore, who was the next* to investigate this difficult problem, endeavoured to obtain a more exact result, by considering the earth as a homogeneous fluid body, consisting of an infinite number of particles, mutually and equally acting upon each other. Calculating from these data, he found that the earth was an ellipsoid, and that the two axes were to each other, as 229 to 230.

Astronomers would probably have remained satisfied with these proportions, and confined their future inquiries to the mere admeasurement of an arc of the meridian, but for the trigonometrical operations commenced by Mr. Picard, and completed by Mr. Cassini, for determining the meridian of the Observatory of Paris. For on a comparison of these measurements, it appeared, that a degree of the meridian, instead of becoming longer, became shorter, on advancing towards the pole. A circumstance so unexpected, naturally excited a good deal of inquiry, and some controversy; and the French mathematicians, confident of the accuracy of their measurements, pronounced the figure of the earth to be that of a prolate, not an oblate spheroid. This opinion had been broached some years before, by Eisenschmidt, an eminent German mathematician. But his arguments having been drawn from the old measurements of Eratosthenes, Snellius, and others, were not regarded as sufficiently conclusive, to excite much

attention.

To clear up this point, about the year 1735, the French Government, at the instance of the Academy of Sciences, determined on sending out two companies of mathematicians, to measure two degrees of the meridian, one under the equator, and the other as near the pole as might be. Accordingly Messrs. Godin, Bouguer, and La Condamine, were ordered to proceed to Peru, and Messrs. Maupertuis, Clairaut, Camus, Le Monnier, and the Abbé Outhier, to Lapland. Both parties, after encountering many unforeseen difficulties and delays, which it required no small share of address and ingenuity to overcome, completed the object of their mission, and returned to France.

* In this assertion we have implicitly followed our author, but we are rather inclined to believe, that Newton's solution was, in fact, antecedent te that of Huyghens.

During the absence of these gentlemen, Mr. Mc Laurin had published his Treatise on Fluxions, in which he gave a very elegant demonstration of Sir Isaac Newton's Solution*. The work was deservedly much read and admired. But whether it had any effect in determining the public opinion on this question, is not at this time easy to discover. Mathematicians, however, never seem to have generally acquiesced in the prolate figure of the earth, but rather to have suspected, that the French measurements were erroneous. Accordingly they were examined in 1740 by M. Cassini,grandson of the former, and several considerable errors were detected.

The results of all the measurements, were now decidedly in favour of the oblate figure of the earth; and the only difficulty that remained, was to reconcile them to each other. For though they all concurred in proving the figure of the earth to be that of an oblate spheroid, yet taken by pairs, they gave different degrees of eccentricity.

Thus the measurements of Peru and France, gave 313 to 314, while those of France and Lapland gave 128 to 129, and those of Peru and Lapland 212 to 213, for the proportions of the two diameters.

M. Bouguer, in a work published some years after his return to Europe, has taken great pains to reconcile these different measures, and to find out the figure, which will best accord with them in general, but without success. His investigation rather seems to indicate, that our planet is not reducible to any regular figure.

A few years before M. Bouguer's work appeared, M. Clairaut had published his elaborate Treatise on the Figure of the Earth, in which he shews, from the Newtonian Theory of Gravity, the form which a fluid body would acquire, from its rotatory motion. He found, that a globe of the mean density of our earth, might remain in equilibrium, supposing it to revolve in about 2h. 25. when the two diameters would be to each other, as 1 to 2.7 nearly. If moved with greater velocity, the spheroid would in consequence become more and more oblate; which alteration in the figure, would occasion a gradual retardation of the rotatory motion, until the equilibrium were again restored. On the contrary, supposing the diurnal revolution in any degree slower, then there were two figures, and only two, in which the equilibrium could be preserved. The two diameters of these figures, in a body of the mean density of our earth, and revolving with the same velocity, would be to each other, as 1 to 68, and as 231 to 233. Either of them is equally possible, but the former evidently is not the figure of our earth. The latter is nearly the same as was formerly found by Sir Isaac Newton. With this eccentricity, however, the vibrations of the pendulum do not agree. The mean of a great number of experi ments with this instrument, is nearly. M. Clairaut notices this circumstance, and hence endeavours to prove that the earth is not homogeneous, but denser at the centre, than towards the surface. This is known to be the case in the planet Jupiter, and the recent measurements in France and this country, seem to confirm the opinion of M. Clairaut.

The figure of the earth may also be deduced from the phænomena of precession and nutation; but Mr. Svanberg seems to think the calculation much too delicate to be relied on. We are not however of his opinion, being persuaded that these, and the vibrations of the pendulum, after all, will be found among the most accurate methods of determining, at least, the general outline of our globe.

*Newton's solution was published without a demonstration.

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