“Euclid Simplified”

Abstract

MR. MORELL's defence is a curious one, and amounts to this: “if my book is a bad one I am not to be blamed, because I have copied from Amiot, Legendre, and others. If I have made blunders in derivations, &c., again I am not to blame, but to be pitied, because I could not employ better printers.” As in our former notice we limited our remarks to a few only of the objectionable features in “Euclid Simplified,” so, in our present notice, we shall select a few only of the points put forward in Mr. Morell's letter, though we may observe in passing, that we see no reason to retract any of our previous comments. We think that our readers will agree with us when we state our belief that Mr. Morell has utterly failed in most, if not in all cases, to appreciate the force of our objections. Mr. M. correctly quotes Dr. Wormell (pp. 78–81), but fails to see that his own statement is widely different; had he written “perpendicular to the straight line A A through its centre” (p. 41), “perpendicular to A B through its middle point” (p. 42), we should not have found fault with him. Again, the reference to Mr. Gerard (p. 310) is not to the point; we can understand what is meant by a “segment capable of a given angle,” but we still object to the term “capable angle.” The revised definition of parallelogram is, now (see text and letter), “a quadrilateral of which the opposite sides are equal and parallel!” We did not object to the term lozenge, which is a well-known one, but to the way in which it was introduced.