Nothing can be more correct, or more identically logical: +5 and -5, standing alone, are jargon if +5 and -5 are to be understood as without reference to another quantity. But those who have "formed to themselves some other idea" see meaning enough. The great difficulty of the opponents of algebra lay in want of power or will to see extension of terms. Maseres is right when he implies that extension, accompanied by its refusal, makes jargon. One of my paradoxers was present at a meeting of the Royal Society (in 1864, I think) and asked permission to make some remarks upon a paper. He rambled into other things, and, naming me, said that I had written a book in which two sides of a triangle are pronounced _equal_ to the third.[462] So they are, in the sense in which the word is used in complete algebra; in which A + B = C makes A, B, C, three sides of a triangle, and declares that going over A and B, one after the other, is equivalent, in change of place, to going over C at once. My critic, who might, if he pleased, have objected to extension, insisted upon reading me in unextended meaning. On the other hand, it must be said that those who wrote on the other idea wrote very obscurely about it and justified Des Cartes (_De Methodo_)[463] when he said: "Algebram vero, ut solet doceri, animadverti certis regulis et numerandi formulis ita esse contentam, ut videatur potius ars quaedam confusa, cujus usu ingenium quodam modo turbatur et obscuratur, quam scientia qua excolatur et perspicacius {205} reddatur."[464] Maseres wrote this sentence on the title of his own work, now before me; he would have made it his motto if he had found it earlier. There is, I believe, in Cobbett's _Annual Register_,[465] an account of an interview between Maseres and Cobbett when in prison. The conversation of Maseres was lively, and full of serious anecdote: but only one attempt at humorous satire is recorded of him; it is an instructive one. He was born in 1731 (Dec. 15), and his father was a refugee. French was the language of the house, with the pronunciation of the time of Louis XIV. He lived until 1824 (May 19), and saw the race of refugees who were driven out by the first Revolution. Their pronunciation differed greatly from his own; and he used to amuse himself by mimicking them. Those who heard him and them had the two schools of pronunciation before them at once; a thing which seldom happens. It might even yet be worth while to examine the Canadian pronunciation.