PARENTAGE AND EARLY LIFE
I will publish whenever an opportunity arises. I am now busy working my way through algebra and the higher geometry, and I intend to make such progress in it as to be able in time to continue Polheimer's discoveries. . . . When the plates for the globes arrive in Sweden, Professor Elfvius will perhaps take care to have them printed and made up. I shall send a specimen very soon; but no impression is to be sold." In this same letter he mentions valuable English books, and names all the principal poets as well worth reading for the sake of their imagination alone. In mild terms he complains of his father's not supplying him better with money; and we find the complaint quite pardonable when we remember that the father was borrowing his children's inheritance from their mother for his own enterprises, and when we learn that Emanuel had received from him but two hundred rixdalers—about two hundred and twenty-five dollars—in sixteen months. He says it is hard to live without food or drink.
Writing again to Benzelius, August, 1712, he repeats his confidence in his new method of finding the longitude, which Dr. Halley admitted to
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