Now it is clear that m^2/3n, m^2/5n, m^2/7n, etc. must at last become and continue severally less than unity. The continued fraction is therefore incommensurable, and cannot be unity. Consequently [pi]^2 cannot be commensurable: that is, [pi] is an incommensurable quantity, and so also is [pi]^2. I thought I should end with a grave bit of appendix, deeply mathematical: but paradox follows me wherever I go. The foregoing is--in my own language--from Dr. (now Sir David) Brewster's[676] English edition of Legendre's Geometry, (Edinburgh, 1824, 8vo.) translated by some one who is not named. I picked up a notion, which others had at Cambridge in 1825, that the translator was the late Mr. Galbraith,[677] then known at Edinburgh as a writer and teacher. {373} But it turns out that it was by a very different person, and one destined to shine in quite another walk; it was a young man named Thomas Carlyle.[678] He prefixed, from his own pen, a thoughtful and ingenious essay on Proportion, as good a substitute for the fifth Book of Euclid as could have been given in the space; and quite enough to show that he would have been a distinguished teacher and thinker on first principles. But he left the field immediately. * * * * * (The following is the passage referred to at Vol. II, page 54.) Michael Stifelius[679] edited, in 1554, a second edition of the Algebra (_Die Coss._), of Christopher Rudolff.[680] This is one of the earliest works in which + and - are used. Stifelius was a queer man. He has introduced into this very work of Rudolff his own interpretation of the number of the Beast. He determined to fix the character of Pope Leo: so he picked the numeral letters from LEODECIMVS, and by taking in X from LEO X. and striking out M as standing for _mysterium_, he hit the number exactly. This discovery completed his conversion to Luther, and his determination to throw off his monastic vows. Luther dealt with him as straight-forwardly as with Melanchthon about his astrology: he accepted the conclusions, but told him to clear his mind of all the premises about the Beast. Stifelius {374} did not take the advice, and proceeded to settle the end of the world out of the prophet Daniel: he fixed on October, 1533. The parishioners of some cure which he held, having full faith, began to spend their savings in all kinds of good eating and drinking; we may charitably hope this was not the way of preparing for the event which their pastor pointed out. They succeeded in making themselves as fit for Heaven as Lazarus, so far as beggary went: but when the time came, and the world lasted on, they wanted to kill their deceiver, and would have done so but for the interference of Luther. {375} * * * * * INDEX.