STONE

, (Edmund), a good Scotch mathematician, who was author of several ingenious works. I know not the particular place or date of his birth, but it was probably in the shire of Argyle, and about the beginning of the present century, or conclusion of the last. Nor have we any memoirs of his life, except a letter from the Chevalier de Ramsay, author of the Travels of Cyrus, in a letter to father Castel, a Jesuit at Paris, and published in the Memoires de Trevoux, p. 109, as follows: “True genius overcomes all the disadvantages of birth, fortune, and education; of which Mr. Stone is a rare example. Born a son of a gardener of the duke of Argyle, he arrived at 8 years of age before he learnt to read.—By chance a servant having taught young Stone the letters of the alphabet, there needed nothing more to discover and expand his genius. He applied himself to study, and he arrived at the knowledge of the most sublime geometry and analysis, without a master, without a conductor, without any other guide but pure genius.”

“At 18 years of age he had made these considerable advances without being known, and without knowing himself the prodigies of his acquisitions. The duke of Argyle, who joined to his military talents, a general knowledge of every science that adorns the mind of a man of his rank, walking one day in his garden, saw lying on the grass a Latin copy of Sir Isaac Newton's celebrated Principia. He called some one to him to take and carry it back to his library. Our young gardener told him that the book belonged to him. To you? replied the Duke. Do you understand geometry, Latin, Newton? I know a little of them, replied the young man with an air of simplicity arising from a profound ignorance of his own knowledge and talents. The Duke was surprised; and having a taste for the sciences, he entered into conversation with the young mathematician: he asked him several questions, and was astonished at the force, the accuracy, and the candour of his answers. But how, said the Duke, came you by the knowledge of all these things? Stone replied, A servant taught me, ten years since, to read: does one need to know any thing more than the 24 letters in order to learn every thing else that one wishes? The Duke's curiosity redoubled—he sat down upon a bank, and requested a detail of all his proceedings in becoming so learned.”

“I first learned to read, said Stone: the masons were then at work upon your house: I went near them one day, and I saw that the architect used a rule, compasses, and that he made calculations. I enquired what might be the meaning of and use of these things; and I was informed that there was a science called Arithmetic; I purchased a book of arithmetic, and I learned it.—I was told there was another science called Geometry: I bought the books, and I learnt geometry. By reading I found that there were good books in these two sciences in Latin: I bought a dictionary, and I learned Latin. I understood also that there were good books of the same kind in French: I bought a dictionary, and I learned French. And this, my lord, is what I have done: it seems to me that we may learn every thing when we know the 24 letters of the alphabet.

This account charmed the Duke. He drew this wonderful genius out of his obscurity; and he provided him with an employment which left him plenty | of time to apply himself to the sciences. He discovered in him also the same genius for music, for painting, for architecture, for all the sciences which depend on calculations and proportions.”

“I have seen Mr. Stone. He is a man of great simplicity. He is at present sensible of his own knowledge: but he is not puffed up with it. He is possessed with a pure and distinterested love for the mathematics; though he is not solicitous to pass for a mathematician; vanity having no part in the great labour he sustains to excel in that science. He despises fortune also; and he has solicited me twenty times to request the duke to give him less employment, which may not be worth the half of that he now has, in order to be more retired, and less taken off from his favourite studies. He discovers sometimes, by methods of his own, truths which others have discovered before him. He is charmed to find on these occasions that he is not a first inventor, and that others have made a greater progress than he thought. Far from being a plagiary, he attributes ingenious solutions, which he gives to certain problems, to the hints he has found in others, although the connection is but very distant,” &c.

Mr. Stone was author and translator of several useful works; viz.

1. A New Mathematical Dictionary, in 1 vol. 8vo, first printed in 1726.

2. Fluxions, in 1 vol. 8vo, 1730. The Direct Method is a translation from the French, of Hospital's Analyse des Infiniments Petits; and the Inverse Method was supplied by Stone himself.

3. The Elements of Euclid, in 2 vols. 8vo, 1731. A neat and useful edition of those Elements, with an account of the life and writings of Euclid, and a defence of his elements against modern objectors.

Beside other smaller works.

Stone was a fellow of the Royal Society, and had inserted in the Philos. Transactions (vol. 41, pa. 218) an “Account of two species of lines of the 3d order, not mentioned by Sir Isaac Newton, or Mr. Stirling.”