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 preserve my sense sufficiently to be able to ascertain the curve so generated by my body to describe it on paper, and demonstrate its peculiar properties: and am not without hope, if I can meet with horses not too sure-footed, by frequent experiments, to determine what kind of parabola it is safest to describe; which problem will, I apprehend, be found very serviceable in practice, at the City Hunt in Easter week, and during the celebration of Epsom races.

Not long ago, by a particular convulsion of the animal from which I was so fortunate as to fall, I was very irregularly thrown to the earth, but had the satisfaction afterwards to discover that the curve described in my fall was a segment of a very eccentric ellipse, of which the saddle was one focus; and that it was nearly, if not exactly, the same with the path of the comet now expected to return. And once, by a succussation, still more anomalous, I was happy enough to describe a new curve, which I found to possess some very amazing properties; and I