Abstract
THIS book covers exactly the same ground as Pinkerton's, which we noticed in NATURE, vol. xxxi. p. 148. The two have many good points in common, and we should be well satisfied to use either of them as a text-book. Mr. Lock's great advantage is preceptorial skill in arrangement and exposition. On this score he deserves much credit indeed. There are very few points on which it is possible to suggest improvement. The retention of the expression “circular measure” in all its former importance, notwithstanding the introduction and constant use of the term “radian,” is regrettable but not of much consequence: the mode, however, which he employs for indicating the word “radian,” e.g. writing π c for π radians, is most unfortunate, and we should hope altogether unacceptable. It is surprising too to find so skilled a teacher following the multitude in condescending to recognise those unnecessary nuisances, “tabular logarithmic sines,” &c. Their existence, Mr. Lock says, is due to a typographic difficulty—a statement we hesitate to give assent to; but, be their history what it may, they serve no purpose nowadays whatever, except to roughen the learner's path. Writers require to give them a foolish name and a special symbol, to alter the formulæ for solution, and to burden the learner with additional cautions,—and all for less than nothing. It seems almost malicious indeed to force on a “beginner” such gratuitous absurdities as “natural sines,” “logarithmic sines,” and “tabular logarithmic sines,” when the entities to be dealt with are simply sines and logarithms of sines. If Mr. Lock in a succeeding edition could see his way to inaugurate the necessary reform here, many teachers would be grateful to him.
Trigonometry for Beginners, as far as the Solution of Triangles.
By the Rev. J. B. Lock., Senior Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886.)
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[Book Reviews]. Nature 33, 438 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/033438a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/033438a0