person and pursuit, an earnest adept in mathematics. I had a fondness for arithmetic, derived from my father, and used often to work out by myself the more difficult problems in Daboll, the standard book of the times, and show him the result, because it was always repaid by his peculiar smile, and coveted eulogium of "Good child! good child!" But this earnest-minded gentleman, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, finding in me the application that he liked, led me on from stage to stage of accuracy in computation, to higher principles and pleasures of demonstrative science, where, fearing no change, no failure of experiment, no mistake in conclusion, we advance fearlessly to the truth, and are satisfied. The salutary influence of such studies on the intellect, especially that of females, I believe to be great. Too little time is apt to be accorded to them. It was so in my own case. Yet I look back on them now, at this great distance of time, as on a heritage not to be alienated. My enthusiasm, while pursuing them, led me to endorse the precept which Plato caused to be inscribed over the door of his school: "Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry." After my school-days were over, and philosophical reading became a source of satisfaction, I fully subscribed to the axiom of Bacon: "Mathematics, if the mind be too wandering, fix it; if too inherent in the senses, abstract it." I have always felt in some degree a debtor to warm-hearted Erin for the instructions of this her
