As I have said before, I am no mathematician, but I must confess that your explanation makes very little more sense to me than your original mathematical formulae. As I understand it, you are proposing a set of equations which will show the range of any weapon by computing the weight of the ball against the weight of the powder. (Perhaps I err here, but that is my understanding.) It seems to me that you are building a castle-in-Spain on rather insubstantial ground. Where is your data? What research have you done on cannon-fire? Without a considerable body of facts to work with, such broad generalisations as you propose are quite out of order. Even if such a thing could be done--which, pardon me, I take the liberty to doubt--I fear it would be impractical. I realise that you know nothing of military problems, so I must point out to you that our cannoneers are enlisted men--untutored, rough soldiers, not educated gentlemen. Many of them cannot read, much less compute abstruse geometrical formulae. It will be difficult enough to teach them to use the range tables when we complete them. Indeed, I may say that this last point is one of the many stumbling-blocks in the path of our project. More than one of the staff at the War Office has considered it to be insurmountable, and many times I have fought for the continuance of the research in the face of great opposition. I greatly fear that using any but methods known to be practicable would result in our appropriation being cut off in Parliament. Again, however, I thank you for your interest. Most sincerely, Ballister-ffoulkes * * * * * 24 January 1667 Cambridge My dear Isaac, I am truly sorry I didn't get around to looking over your second manuscript until now, but, to be perfectly truthful, I have been outlining our course of work on conic sections, and had little time for it. As it turns out, it was all for the best that I did so; it would have been sinful to take valuable time away from my work for such trivialities. You are still harping on your wine-barrel fluxions and your Army cannon balls. Am I to presume that the whole thing is a joke? Or are you seriously proposing that the path of a cannon ball is related to the phases of the moon? That is rank superstition! Sheer magic! One would think that even a lad as young as yourself would have grasped the basic concept of the Scientific Method by this time. How have you tested this absurd thing experimentally? Where are your measurements, your data? Your references?