APOLOGIES TO CLUVIER.

It is part of my function to do justice to any cyclometers whose methods have been wrongly described by any orthodox sneerers (myself included). In this character I must notice _Dethlevus Cluverius_,[615] as the Leipzig Acts call him (probably Dethleu Cluvier), grandson of the celebrated geographer, Philip Cluvier. The grandson was a Fellow of the Royal Society, elected on the same day as Halley,[616] November 30, 1678: I suppose he lived in England. This {333} man is quizzed in the Leipzig Acts for 1686; and, if Montucla insinuate rightly, by Leibnitz, who is further suspected of wanting to embroil Cluvier with his own opponent Nieuwentiit,[617] on the matter of infinitesimals. So far good: I have nothing against Leibnitz, who though he was ironical, told us what he laughed at. But Montucla has behaved very unfairly: he represents Cluvier as placing the essence of his method in the solution of the problem _construere mundum divinae menti analogum_, to construct a world corresponding to the divine mind. Nothing to begin with: no way of proceeding. Now, it ought to have been _ex data linea construere_,[618] etc.: there is a given line, which is something to go on. Further, there is a way of proceeding: it is to find the product of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. for ever. Moreover, Montucla charges Cluvier with _unsquaring_ the parabola, which Archimedes had squared as tight as a glove. But he never mentions how very nearly Cluvier agrees with the Greek: they only differ by 1 divided by 3n^2, where n is the infinite number of parts of which a parabola is composed. This must have been the conceit that tickled Leibnitz, and made him wish that Cluvier and Nieuwentiit should fight it out. Cluvier, was admitted, on terms of irony, into the Leipzig Acts: he appeared on a more serious footing in London. It is very rare for one cyclometer to refute another: _les corsaires ne se battent pas_.[619] The only instance I recall is that of M. Cluvier, who (_Phil. Trans._, 1686, No. 185) refuted M. Mallemont de Messange,[620] who {334} published at Paris in 1686. He does it in a very serious style, and shows himself a mathematician. And yet in the year in which, in the _Phil. Trans._, he was a geometer, and one who rebukes his squarer for quoting Matthew xi. 25, in that very year he was the visionary who, in the Leipzig Acts, professed to build a world resembling the divine mind by multiplying together 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. up to infinity.