articles concerning new inventions, _projects and problems for scientific investigations and experiments_.[19] In the year 1718 he has completed a new method of reckoning with the number 8 as the base; and the following year he publishes a still better ›Proposal to divide our money and measures, so that the calculation would be easy and all fractions be abolished›, and this system is nothing less than the _Decimal system_![20] He also published during these years an ingenious method of determining the longitude by means of the moon, a problem upon which the learned had at that time been engaged for several years.[21] SWEDENBORG thus succeeded in penetrating very deeply into the mathematical and mechanical sciences, and therefore at first it must arouse astonishment that he did not accept the professor’s chair in mathematics at Uppsala University when this was offered him. He wished for freedom to study in other departments also. And, as we shall see, he soon turned his interest in another direction, namely to geology. However, it was also a characteristic in SWEDENBORG, worthy of admiration, that in spite of his deep penetration into the sciences and the bold ideas of his creative genius, he nevertheless strove, at the same time, to retain contact with practical life and there cause the results of his investigations to bear fruit. It was also this purpose which to a great extent influenced him not to accept the offered professorship in mathematics, which he feared would force him into a direction too theoretical. In this respect there were, as some of his biographers have shown, several points of similarity between SWEDENBORG and his patron, King Charles XII., namely, ›the unusual combination of the boldest imagination and a pronounced practical tendency›.[22] And as both were animated by the same ›burning inclination for all that is great in thought and deed›, and by the same love of the fatherland, therefore, when these two men found one another, there was an interesting cooperation. Professor HOLMQUIST has given a very good description of this in his essay alluded to above, from which I shall here reproduce some extracts: