Robert Recorde may be considered as the founder of analytical science in England. The author of the first English work on algebra (1557) has not, however, as might have been expected, produced a mere elementary compilation, but a work that ranks, for originality and depth, with the ablest foreign contemporary productions on the same subject. What is rather inexplicable, this book by Recorde appears an oasis in a century deficient in this science, and no Englishman is known to have pursued the study of algebra to an equal extent before the time of Harriot. With the exception of a trifling essay by Thomas Digges in the Stratioticos, and a few memoranda in a MS. of Blagrave's in Lambeth Palace^[1], we scarcely know of anything connected with this branch of science that is worthy of notice, and even these include only the simplest elementary principles.

It is somewhat remarkable that this dearth of analytical science was not the result of a prejudice in favour of the geometry of the ancients. We have, it is true, an elaborate edition of Euclid by Dee and Billingsley, but with this the taste for geometry appears to have expired. We do not find that Harriot and the contemporary English analysts were fettered by a prejudice in favour of the old geometry, such as for a length of time pervaded the writers of the continent; although, indeed, it appears from Harriot's