Genre:

Serial, Letter

Subjects:

Mathematics, Light, Amusement, Education, Nomenclature, Gender, Truth, Deduction, Supernaturalism, Theory, Practice

    The narrator is pleased that his niece approves the subject of his letters, and observes: 'if I can soften that seeming ruggidness, which its technical terms and the abstract references of its general principles have given it, and at the same time keep your mind alive to the beauty of those simple truths on which it is founded, I may indeed promise you the liveliest gratification in the pursuit'. The 'plain elementary truths of nature' are often disregarded, but by deduction they can explain astonishing or even apparently supernatural occurrences. The narrator relates that this observation is a response to his niece's comment 'that the beginning of Simson's Euclid, into which some time since, you casually turned, appeared to be learned trifling'. The letter provides an account of the theory of perspective, with the promise of the 'more pleasing practical part' in the next letter. (161)