The _Doctrine of Life Annuities_[466] (4to, 726 pages, 1783) is a strange paradox. Its size, the heavy dissertations on the national debt, and the depth of algebra supposed known, put it out of the question as an elementary work, and it is unfitted for the higher student by its elaborate attempt at elementary character, shown in its rejection of forms derived from chances in favor of _the average_, and its exhibition of the separate values of the years of an annuity, as arithmetical illustrations. It is a climax of unsaleability, unreadability, and inutility. For intrinsic nullity of interest, and dilution of little matter with much ink, I can compare this book to nothing but that of Claude de St. Martin, elsewhere mentioned, or the lectures _On the Nature and Properties of Logarithms_, by James Little,[467] Dublin, 1830, 8vo. (254 heavy pages of many words and few symbols), a wonderful weight of weariness.
The stock of this work on annuities, very little diminished, was given by the author to William Frend, who paid warehouse room for it until about 1835, when he consulted me as to its disposal. As no publisher could be found who would take it as a gift, for any purpose of sale, it was consigned, all but a few copies, to a buyer of waste paper.
Baron Maseres's republications are well known: the _Scriptores Logarithmici_[468] is a set of valuable reprints, mixed { 207} with much which might better have entered into another collection. It is not so well known that there is a volume of optical reprints, _Scriptores Optici_, London, 1823, 4to, edited for the veteran of ninety-two by Mr. Babbage[469] at twenty-nine. This excellent volume contains James Gregory, Des Cartes, Halley, Barrow, and the optical writings of Huyghens, the _Principia_ of the undulatory theory. It also contains, by the sort of whim in which such men as Maseres, myself, and some others are apt to indulge, a reprint of "The great new Art of weighing Vanity,"[470] by M. Patrick Mathers, Arch-Bedel to the University of St. Andrews, Glasgow, 1672. Professor Sinclair,[471] of Glasgow, a good man at clearing mines of the water which they did not want, and furnishing cities with water which they did want, seems to have written absurdly about hydrostatics, and to have attacked a certain Sanders,[472] M.A. So Sanders, assisted by James Gregory, published a heavy bit of jocosity about him. This story of the authorship rested on a note made in his { 208} copy by Robert Gray, M.D.; but it has since been fully confirmed by a letter of James Gregory to Collins, in the Macclesfield Correspondence. "There is one Master Sinclair, who did write the _Ars Magna et Nova_,[473] a pitiful ignorant fellow, who hath lately written horrid nonsense in the hydrostatics, and hath abused a master in the University, one Mr. Sanders, in print. This Mr. Sanders ... is resolved to cause the Bedel of the University to write against him.... We resolve to make excellent sport with him."