Pièce 2 - Letter from William Hartshorn

4 pp

13 Upper Warwick St., Toxteth Park, Liverpool - WH read for honours in theology and Hebrew at Dublin University but was prevented by the Articles from taking orders: 'I do not now lament my disappointment. A great work has to be done in our large towns. You, sir, cannot believe what I see daily, the ignorance of science not only in our merchants and manufactures, but in the officers of our merchant navy, in our shipbuilders, in our mechanicians, (my uncle Mr Maudslay you have heard of) and even in our engineers. As superintendent of the evening schools at the Mechanics Institution I have the best possible opportunity for learning what is the ignorance of all orders in this great community'. He has always admired WW's scientific views. However he feels the 'Doctrine of Limits' [The Doctrine of Limits with its Applications Namely Conic Sections, the First Three Sections of Newton, the Differential Calculus, 1838] could be slightly improved if he 'added as much Physical Astronomy, analytically treated, from your Dynamics [An Introduction to Dynamics Containing the Laws of Motion and the First Three Sections of the Principia, 1832] as would be equivalent to the first ten pages of Stevenson's Newton's Lunar Theory. I never understood the correction of integrals until I was reading Poisson's Dynamics'. Again he was a bit disappointed with WW's 'Mechanics of Engineering': 'It is true you wrote it for one kind of student, I wanted it for another and a very different kind'. He believes many Cambridge mathematical works have done mischief in Britain's large towns: 'When our country mathematicians read Emerson's books, Benjamin Martin's, and especially J. Simpson's whom I can never name without emotion, - they knew what they were doing, and they could use what they learned. Now they are tempted to try Hall, Hind, Thompson or Young - the last two not Cambridge men it is true - and they become bewildered - 'in mystic symbols lost' - if I may parody. I never knew a mechanic confused or discouraged by Simpson's Fluxions'. 'We of the great manufacturing and commercial towns cannot attempt to be learned mathematicians. We cannot connect ourselves with the past. We are essentially progressive. For us is wanted a course of mathematics containing only the methods that are for us the best. But who is to make out such a course and give t the uniformity, simplicity, inventive strength and perfect beauty, without which science is not worthy of the name of mathematics. Our merchants in Liverpool suffer the worst consequence of ignorance, they are unconscious of their misfortune, their weakness and their degradation. I have seen some of them admiring that silly and pernicious book 'the Vestiges''. Boys in large towns like Liverpool are sent to business at an age which is shamefully early. If they would leave them at school until they are sixteen I could carry them over the greater part of the course you, sir, propose for junior optimes'.