Thomas {304} Simpson[558] has chanced to know of Oughtred's "Trigonometrie": and the present revival is due to his letter, not to his book. A casual reader, turning over the pages, would imagine that almost all the letters had been printed, either in the General Dictionary, or in Birch,[559] etc.: so often does the supplementary remark begin with "this letter has been printed in ----." For ourselves we thought, until we counted, that a large majority of the letters had been given, either in whole or in part. But the positive strikes the mind more forcibly than the negative: we find that all of which any portion has been in type makes up very little more than a quarter; the cases in which the whole letter is given being a minority of this quarter. The person who has been best ransacked is Flamsteed: of 36 letters from him, 34 had been previously given in whole or in part. Of 59 letters to and from Newton, only 17 have been culled. The letters have been modernized in spelling, and, to some extent, in algebraical notation; it also seems that conjectural methods of introducing interpolations into the text have been necessary. For all this we are sorry: the scientific value of the collection is little altered, but its literary value is somewhat lowered. But it could not be helped: the printers could not work from the originals, and Professor Rigaud had to copy everything himself. A fac-simile must have been the work of more time than he had to give: had he attempted it, his death would have cut short the whole undertaking, instead of allowing him to prepare everything but a preface, and to superintend the printing of one of the volumes. We may also add, that we believe we have notices of _all_ the letters in the Macclesfield collection. We judge this because several which are too trivial to print are numbered and described; and those would certainly not have been noticed if _any_ omissions had {305} been made. And we know that every letter was removed from Shirburn Castle to Oxford.