fatal malady which caused his premature death were already sown.

He writes to his son:

"Kentish Town, April 1, 1874

"MY DEAREST How,-We have made the great change. I trust in God that it will be for good. I think it was a true desire for good that moved me to the resolve; and nothing more encouraged me than the kind and generous and loving way in which my children, as well as mamma, entered into my hopes and aims, and chose less of this world's advantages in order that those aims might be carried out. It was a trouble getting out of the house. I could only feel one thing-a hope that I might never have so much furniture again.

"As you may suppose, I feel the change. Already the whole Savile Row life seems like a dream to me. It is as if it had never been; so much so, that even the old Tottenham life seems nearer and realer. But perhaps this is only temporary. But the feeling that has come is not one of great depression, which I should have thought natural-I only had a few hours of that-but one of great seriousness and solemnity. The excitement of my recent life has passed away, and I want to pause and think, and be spoken to again by God, in quietness. Then I have had a sort of unrooted baselessness of feeling, as if I had no place in the world, and especially a feeling of total and utter impotence, as if I never had been or should be able to do anything again. This has been very strong, but it is passing away; and as I was reading some of Matthew Browne's essays yesterday I felt quite a passionate gladness come over me that my business now was with human life.

'Willy will come to you to-morrow. After he has had

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a little rest try and get him to work, and help him a little. You can do this in his natural philosophy. I believe he will get through. I tell him I believe in him; which, indeed, I always did and do. It is impossible to look in his face and not believe in him. Mamma has gone to grandmamma's at Bristol.-Your loving father, "J. HINTON."

Mr. Hinton had suffered the loss of his father in 1873, as is already briefly alluded to in one of his letters; and now the sacred tie of so many years between mother and son was to be broken, and he was to lose his surviving parent. She died at the good old age of fourscore years, having peacefully bidden her beloved son "good-night" just before her eternal morning broke.

"Thanks, dearest mother," he writes, after a memorandum of the day of her death, "thanks to you now in heaven, thanks always, and boundless, for the reverence and respect for woman that you taught me, even if nothing were to come of it but my own delight and gladness and truer seeing of her loving heart."

His parting gift to his profession was his "Questions on Aural Surgery," and his " Atlas of the Ear," the latter a work of great labour, the drawings of which were executed by Mrs. Hinton, the originals being presented to Guy's Hospital. The whole work is the recognised text-book of the branch of the profession which Mr. Hinton had made his own, and formed a valuable advance in aural surgery.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE summer of 1874 was spent chiefly at Lulworth in Dorsetshire. Mrs. Hinton was at this time very much out of health, and needed absolute rest and quiet. So it was determined that she should winter with one of her children in the Azores, where, as has been already mentioned, Mr. Hinton had purchased a small property. Mr. Hinton acquiesced in what he felt was best for her, as securing her entire rest from all the exciting subjects that engrossed his own mind. Their home was therefore temporarily broken up.

“Kentish Town, 14th April 1874. am glad of your little note. now all you write, because I

"MY DEAR HOw,-I You must send to me shall have more time to enter into your pursuits, which I have long desired; and also you must give me some lifts in mathematics. I must attend to them a little. They are so interesting and so full of suggestiveness, I have been going on a little with Mrs. Boole in our desultory way, which nevertheless has its value, at least for me. I got a little inkling about the conic sections, and then we came on to the calculus. It is very jolly; and I find it quite like what I thought it. The four forms of it are such fun. The Fluxion (what I call the honest or nature-form) as plain as the day; the Infinitesimal, which keeps hold of the infinitely small quantities

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and neglects them (which roused Newton's ire even to madness, and no wonder); the refined Infinitesimal or Differential, which takes the ratio only; and La Grange's, which tries to get round the whole thing, but, as is said, doesn't quite. These are splendidly interesting, quite apart from mathematics; they are a study of human life; nor does one need to know anything more than algebraical notation to enjoy them-I won't say thoroughly, but exquisitely. And my ideas about a new teaching of mathematics become both clearer and more confirmed. I should say this way: What is taught in our schools (to boys) is not mathematics, but a little fraction of the history of mathematics, and not even as a history. It is just as if, in teaching astronomy, boys should not be taught anything of what Copernicus did, but trained just a little bit in the tracing on paper the apparent motions, and formulating them, and should simply hear of Copernicus as a man who did some wonderful thing which great astronomers could know about. That is exactly as our teaching of mathematics does in respect to Newton, and with just as good reason. What Newton did was simply what Copernicus did-to make the thought true to nature, putting aside the non-perception that infects our native vision, and makes us deal first with fictions of our own constructing. Now, I would have every child trained a little in the epicycles before it heard anything about what Copernicus did; and so in geometry. But of course the earth's motion is the beginning of astronomy; so is the fluxion of mathematics. And this should be our teaching of it: This is what Newton did for us: he revealed to us nature, and this is how it was done first; but the dead or fictitious mathematics came before, and must have come.' Then the lessons of it are infinite, for you see what Newton showed us was not-speaking of realities and true

values-anything about magnitudes and spaces (much as that is in one point of view, but it has no glory, by reason of the glory that excelleth; these were just the clay given to create a statue in-anything will do); but what he did was, to show us the everlasting art, the art of Life, of letting go and holding on at once, of having in effect, of raising from things into powers, from physical to spiritual. This is what he taught us. To look merely at the lines and values is as if in a book one should look merely at the letters. It is his process, his act that has an infinite value and significance. That is being true to nature, always and everywhere.

"Then look at the dependent variables. What it is, is the relation of the external law to the law of the soulthe variation of the former with the latter; the mutual varying, indeed. It is Life it teaches us. And so it is all through; the child must have these things put before him quite afresh.

But I suppose, perhaps, it is not 'wise' of me to put these thoughts before you now. Only, I can't think of that, because, you see, you are my dearest friend, whom I want to know all about me. Your loving father, "JAMES HINTON."

"Mr. Hinton used often to remark," writes his friend, Mrs. Boole,* "how curious it is to notice that, whereas everybody thinks of geometry as if it were true, the very type of absolute truth, many people get an impression of something not quite true, not quite satisfactory about all forms of fluxions and calculus methods. And this is natural. The man who says, "Here is a straight line, or circle, or ellipse, I am going to investigate its properties," gives an impression of fixedness and repose, which naturally convey a sense of truth * The widow of the well-known mathematician, Professor Boole.