J. J. A. WORSAAE.
Minor Queries.
Taylor Family.
—A great favour would be conferred by any Worcestershire correspondent who could furnish any information as to the family, arms, place of burial, of Samuel Taylor, who was Mayor of Worcester in 1731-32, and again in 1737. Are any descendants or connexions still resident in that neighbourhood? The information is required for genealogical purposes.
E. S. TAYLOR.
Analysis.
—Is algebra rightly termed analysis? Edgar Poe, a very queer American author, maintains the negative: he also enters into the question as to whether games of skill and chance are useful to the analytical powers, and gives the preference to draughts over chess, and to whist over either. But he seems to think the chief applications of analysis are to the interpretation of cryptographies, the disentanglement of police puzzles, and the solution of charades!
There is, however, plausibility in his theory that a good analyst must be both poet and mathematician. This is Ruskin's "imagination penetrative:" such a faculty belonged to the minds of Verulam and Newton, of Kepler and Galileo. I do not, however, see the necessity of Ruskin's threefold division of the "imaginative faculty." Would not "imagination analytic and creative" suffice?
MORTIMER COLLINS.