[374] "Man, man, man."
[375] "Men, men, men."
[376] It is interesting to read De Morgan's argument against Saint-Martin's authorship of this work. It is attributed to Saint-Martin both by the Biographie Universelle and by the British Museum Catalogue, and De Morgan says by "various catalogues and biographies."
[377] "To explain things by man and not man by things. On Errors and Truth, by a Ph.... Inc...."
[378] "If we would preserve ourselves from all illusions, and above all from the allurements of pride, by which man is so often seduced, we should never take man, but always God, for our term of comparison."
[379] "And here is found already an explanation of the numbers four and nine which caused some perplexity in the work cited above. Man is lost in passing from four to nine."
[380] Williams also took part in the preparation of some tables for the government to assist in the determination of longitude. He had published a work two years before the one here cited, on the same subject,—An entire new work and method to discover the variation of the Earth's Diameters, London, 1786.
[381] This is Gabriel Mouton (1618-1694), a vicar at Lyons, who suggested as a basis for a natural system of measures the mille, a minute of a degree of the meridian. This appeared in his Observationes diametrorum solis et lunae apparentium, meridianarumque aliquot altitudinum cum tabula declinationum solis.... Lyons, 1670.
[382] Jacques Cassini (1677-1756), one of the celebrated Cassini family of astronomers. After the death of his father he became director of the observatory at Paris. The basis for a metric unit was set forth by him in his Traité de la grandeur et de la figure de la terre, Paris, 1720. He was a prolific writer on astronomy.
[383] Alexis Jean Pierre Paucton (1732-1798). He was, for a time, professor of mathematics at Strassburg, but later (1796) held office in Paris. His leading contribution to metrology was his Métrologie ou Traité des mesures, Paris, 1780.