Mr Newton’s map scaler continued to cause further comments and arguments, particularly here about the point P.
“Mr. Editor, ………………………………………………….Wisbech, April 23d, 1824.
Permit me to drop a line or two for the use of your correspondent Viator*, who, from a paragraph of his in our paper of to-day, seems to have bewildered himself.
In commenting on Mr. I. Newton’s method of transferring maps, &c., Viator has nothing at all to urge against it. To what then, I would ask, do his observations amount? Why they may, in his opinion, serve to show that he is a critic; though, unlike Sterne’s critic, he perhaps may not have a ‘stop watch’ by which to aid or regulate his observations; for he makes no mention of it. But although Viator, forsooth, brings no argument against the correctness of facility of Mr. N.’s method, yet, he is pleased very confidently to assert that the point P may be assumed anywhere, either within or out of the given plan. Now this notion of Viator’s is so palpably absurd, as scarcely to need confuting. For if the point P were taken within the given plan, then it is obvious that the required plan would fall either partly or wholly within the given plan, thus rendering both plans entirely useless, by confounding or mingling them together. The same objection also applies when the point P is taken too near the given plan. Thus if any one of the sides A D of the parallelogram A D C B be produced at A, and P be taken in the part produced, then, in order to have, in each particular case of the problem, the given and required plans separate as they ought to be, the distance P A must not be less tha the side A D. And this is probably one of Mr. N.’s reasons for taking P below A B, at the given distance A D : since a less distance would have been improper, and a greater superfluous. Your’s, Veritas #.”
The Stamford Mercury, 7th May, 1824.
*latin for traveller.
*latin for truth.