Page:Repository of Arts, Series 1, Volume 01, 1809, January-June.djvu/49

 three volumes of Essays on the Art of War, and on Modern Military Tactics.

Mr. John Murdoch of Hart-street, has nearly completed a work which he intends to publish by subscription, to be entitled the Dictionary of Distinctions, which is to consist of three alphabets, containing, 1. Words the same in sound, but of different spelling and signification, including such as have any similarity of sound. 2. Words that vary in pronunciation and meaning, as accentuated or connected. 3. The changes in sound and sense produced by the addition of the letter e.

The Board of Agriculture proceed in their design of completing the County Reports. Berkshire, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, and Derbyshire, are in the press, and expected to appear shortly.

We allow a greater proportion of room to our examination of the two following articles, because we think their merits are not sufficiently known or appreciated.

Among the few publications of merit which the science of numbers has had to boast of for some years past, the above two works bear a prominent rank. To those students who value mathematical knowledge as much on account of the practical use of its rules, as for the habit of demonstrative deduction which the young mind imbibes step by step, the chain of unerring evidence on which its theorems are progressively foundedMr. Dubost’s Commercial Arithmetic will prove a most useful and interesting production. The author appears, very justly, to differ in opinion, from the generality of our writers on elementary arithmetics, who, to judge from their works, conceive that to be the easiest mode of teaching mathematics, which (dispensing with all reasoning) drily and mechanically dictates rule after rule, and depends on the credulity or confidence of the pupil for taking upon trust a volume of abstract precepts without any evidence of their truth; or which (advancing one step farther) ventures to add in abstruse algebraical notes (generally overlooked by the learner,) the proofs of the rules given in the text; methods which reduce the most elevated, and indeed the only certain branch of human knowledge to a mere mechanical operation, and cannot be too soon or too strongly discouraged, because they are founded on error; for experience has shewn, that the pupil will more