Tables of Ancient Coins, Weights and Measures Explain'd and Exemplify'd in Several Dissertations

by John Arbuthnot

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380 pages, Hardcover

First published August 22, 2015

About the author

Law Is a Bottomless Pit , later retitled The History of John Bull , in 1712 published satirical anti-Whig pamphlets of noted Scottish physician and writer John Arbuthnot.

People best remember contributions of this polymath in London to mathematics. As member in the Scriblerus club, he inspired book III of Gulliver's Travels of Jonathan Swift's book III and Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus of Alexander Pope and possibly The Dunciad . He invented the figure.

Quickly after an author died, Edmund Curll commissioned and invented a biography; Arbuthnot, complaining in his mid-life of this work, said, "Biography is one of the new terrors of death," so his own reluctance to leave records makes a difficult biography of Arbuthnot. According to Alexander Pope to Joseph Spence, Arbuthnot allowed his infant children to play with documents and even burnt them. Throughout his professional life, Arbuthnot exhibited a strong humility and conviviality, and his friends complained that he took not credit for his own work.

Arbuthnot went in 1691 to London, where he supposedly taught mathematics, his formal course of study, for support. He lodged with William Pate, whom Jonathan Swift knew and called a "bel esprit." From De ratiociniis in ludo aleae of Christiaan Huygens, he translated his Of the Laws of Chance in 1692. This first work described probability in English. The work, a success, applied the field of probability to common games, and Arbuthnot privately tutored Edward Jeffreys, son of Jeffrey Jeffrey, a member of Parliament. Edward in 1694 attended University College, Oxford, where his tutor met the variety of scholars, including John Radcliffe, Isaac Newton, and Samuel Pepys, , then teaching mathematics and medicine. Already informally well educated, Arbuthnot, however, lacked the money to study full time. He went to the University of Saint Andrews and enrolled as a doctoral student in medicine on 11 September 1696. On the very same day, he defended seven theses on medicine for the award of the doctorate.

Arbuthnot praised mathematics as a method of freeing the mind from superstition.

Arbuthnot of the members founded the Scriblerus club, and the other wits of the group regarded this funniest member, who left least literature with an ease, a humanity, and an apparent sympathy. Similar styles of Swift and Arbuthnot preferred direct sentences and clear vocabulary with a feigned frenzy of lists and taxonomies, and people sometimes attribute their works. People attributed the treatise on political lying definitely of Arbuthnot for example to Swift in the past. Arbuthnot generally attacks the same targets as Swift without as much viciousness or nihilism, and both refuse to hold up a set of positive norms for their readers.

Insistence of Arbuthnot on lack of recognition causes difficulty in speaking definitively of his literary significance. He at the heart of many of the greatest of his age conducted a great many of the finest literary accomplishments of a half century, but Arbuthnot zealously received no credit.