THE BOUQUET.....No. VI.

DEATH OF WIELAND.

The following notice of the death of Wieland, taken originally from the German papers, is translated from the Journal de Paris, of February 11th. It may be interesting to the admirers of Oberon:

CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND, deceased at Weimar, the night of the 20th and 21st of January, 1813, had seen three generations, during which, from the time of Gottsched to our present poetical period, he has contributed to give the greatest lustre to our literature; he had celebrated on the fifth of September last, not far, from Jena, at the country seat of his antient friend Madame Greesback, the widow of the counsellor, the eightieth anniversary of his birth, to the great satisfaction and amidst the felicitations of all his friends at Welmar and Jena. The memory of this event has been preserved in a medal by Facius of Weimar, upon which the profile of our Anacreon is much better represented, than upon a former one executed in 1783 by Abramson at Berlin. Wieland afterwards returned to Weimar, where he continued with the ardor of youth his favorite occupation, the translation of Cicero's letters, and was adding a sixth volume to that beautiful work, of which the fifth part had appeared in the course of 1812. He began to write early in the morning, and as if he foresaw that the sand of time had but a few moments in reserve for him, he did not love to be interrupted in the employment. He had not altered in the least his ordinary mode of life; he appeared occasionally at public spectacles, and frequently visited circles of friends. No person could have less concern about his health, until suddenly a slight change in his regimen, in the use of wine, to which he was accustomed, was followed by a kind of parellydis, attended with spasms resembling in their effects those of the apoplexy. He was at times delirious, with lucid intervals, between which sparks of his poetic genius were still apparent.

The hall of the ducal palace in which his remains were exposed to view, is the same where five years since were placed those of the dutchess Amelia, whom he had so often sung under the name of Olympia.

Wieland had for a long time expressed a desire that his grave should be placed by the side of his wife's, who was buried in 1799, in a rural spot which he owned at Ormanstadt, about a mile from Weimar, between that city and Auerstadt, where was also interred a little daughter of his antient friend Sophie de la Roche. His wish is as sacred as a law to his family. It is to Ormanstadt that the German youth will go to pay a tribute of regret to the poet of the graces and the minstrel of Oberon.

OF THE SCRIPTURES.

In the reign of Henry V. king of England, a law was passed against the perusal of the Scriptures in English. It was enacted, "That whatsoever they were that should read the Scriptures in the mother

tongue, they would forfeit land, catel, lif, and godes, from theyre heyres for ever; and so be condempned for heretykes to God, enemies to the crowne, and most errant trailors to the lande." On contrasting the above statute with the indefatigable exertions that are now making to print and circulate the Bible, what a revolution in public sentiment appears to have taken place!

A CURIOUS MEMOIR OF M. EMANUEL SWEDENBORG,

CHARLES XII. OF SWEDEN.

CONCERNING

Having been frequently admitted to the honor of hearing his most excellent majesty Charles XII. discourse on mathematical subjects, I presume an account of a new arithmetic invented by him, may merit the attention of my readers.

His majesty observed then, that the denary arithmetic, universally received and practised, was most probably derived from the original method of counting on the fingers; that illiterate people of old, when they had run through the fingers of both hands, repeated new periods over and over again, and every time spread open both hands; which being done ten times, they distinguished each step by proper marks, as by joining two, three, or four fingers. Afterwards, when this method of numeration on the fingers, came to be expressed by proper characters, it soon became firmly and universally established, and so the denary computus has been retained to this day. But surely were a solid geometrician, thoroughly versed in the abstract nature and fundamentals of numbers, to set his mind upon introducing a still more useful computus into the world, instead of ten he would select such a perfect square, or cube number, as by continual bissection or halving, that would at length terminate in unity, and be better adapted to the subdivisions of measures, weights, coins, &c.

Thus intent on a new arithmetic, the hero pitched upon the number EIGHT, as most fit for the purpose, since it could not only be halved continually down to unity, without a fraction, but contained within it the square of two, and was itself the cube thereof, and was also applicable to the received denominations of various kinds of weights and coins, rising to sixteen and thirty-two, the double and quadruple of eight. Upon these first considerations, he was pleased to command me to draw up an essay on an octonary computus, which I completed in a few days, with its applications to the received divisions of coins, measures, and weights, a disquisition on cubes and squares, and a new and easy way of extracting roots, all illustrated with examples.

His majesty having cast his eye twice or thrice over it, and observing, perhaps from some hints in the essay, that the denary computus had several advantages not always attended to, he did not at that time seem absolutely to approve of the octonary; or, 'tis like he might conceive, that though it seemed easy in theory, yet it might prove difficult to introduce to practice. Be this as it will, he insisted on fixing upon some other that was both a cube and a square number, referrible to eight, and divisible down to unity by bissection. This VOL. II.

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No. 6.

could be no other than sixty-four, the cube of four, and square of eight, di sible down to unity without a fraction.

I immediately presumed to object, that such a number would be too prolix, as it arises through a series of entirely distinct and different numbers up to 64, and then again to its duplicate 4096, and on to its triplicate 262144, before the fourth step commences; so that the difficulty of such a compulus would be incredible, not only in addition and subtraction, but to a still higher degree, in multiplication and division. For the memory must necessarily retain in the multiplication table 3969 distinct products of the 63 numbers of the first step multiplied into one another, whereas only 49 are necessary in the octonary, and but 8 are required in the denary arithmetic, which last is difficult to be remembered and applied in practice, by some capacities. But the stronger my objections were, the more resolutę was his royal mind upon attempting such a computus.

Obstructions made him eagerly aspire,

All to surmount, and nobly soar the higher.

He insisted that the alledged difficulties might be over-balanced by very many advantages.

A few days after this I was called before his majesty, who resuming the subject, demanded if I had made a trial? I still urging my former objections, he reached me a paper written with his own hand, in new characters and terms of denomination, the perusal of which he was pleased, at my entreaty, to grant me, wherein, to my great surprise, I found not only new characters and numbers (the one almost naturally expressive of the other) in a continued series to 64, so ranged as easily to be remembered, but also new denominations, so contrived by pairs, as to be easily extended to myriads by a continued variation of the character and denomination. And further, casting my eye on several new methods for addition and multiplication by this computus, either artificially contrived or else inherent in the characters of the numbers themselves, I was struck with the profoundest admiration of the force of his majesty's genius, and with such strange amazement, as obliged me to esteem this eminent personage, not my rival, but far my superior in my own art. And having the original still in my custody, at a proper time I may publish it, as it highly deserves: whereby it will appear with what discerning skill he was endowed, and how deeply he penetrated into the obscurest recesses of the arithmetical science,

Besides, his eminent talents in calculation further appear, by his frequently working and solving most difficult numerical problems, barely by thought and memory, in which operation others are obliged to take great pains and tedious labor.

Having duly weighed the vast advantages arising from mathematical and arithmetical knowledge in most occasions of human life, he frequently used it as an adage, that he who is ignorant of numbers is scarce half a man.

Whilst he was at Bendar he composed a complete volume of militay exercises, highly esteemed by those who are best skilled in the art of war.