Select mechanical exercises: shewing how to construct different clocks, orreries, and sun-dials. On plain and easy principles. With several miscellaneous articles, and new tables. I, for expeditiously computing the time of any new or full moon within ... 6,000 years before and after the 18th century ... II. For graduating and examining the usual lines ... To which is prefixed, a short account of the life of the author / by James Ferguson.

  • Ferguson, James, 1710-1776.
Date:
1778
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Select mechanical exercises: shewing how to construct different clocks, orreries, and sun-dials. On plain and easy principles. With several miscellaneous articles, and new tables. I, for expeditiously computing the time of any new or full moon within ... 6,000 years before and after the 18th century ... II. For graduating and examining the usual lines ... To which is prefixed, a short account of the life of the author / by James Ferguson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    writers; and of which an idea may be formed from the account of Dr. Halley, who. fays, that to have his logarithm true to 14 places of figures, Mr. Briggs, by continual extraction, | was obliged to find the root of more than the 140 million of millioneth power. . Euclid Speideil fays, he was told, that only finding the logarithm of 2 true to 15 places, for the aforefaid Table, was the work of eight perfons a whole year; and Pardies, in his Geo- : metry, praifes God, who, for the pub- lic good, has raifed up perfons to whom he had given fufficient patience to furmount the fatigue of a labour feemingly infupportable: “‘ for,” fays he, ‘* we know that more than 20 per- «« fons, employed for that purpofe, s {pent upwards of 20 years with in- “ detatigable affiduity in the calcula- “¢ tion.” This laft teftimony, which fome have thought an infinuation that the logarithms were firft invented in drance; rather proves the genius and . Bienes ability