Professor Sylvester has found a proof of Newton's process for
discovering the "imaginary roots" of any expression—a process hitherto given without proof by all mathematicians, from Newton downwards. The Professor explained it on Wednesday night, at King's College, to about sixty listening mathematicians, and this new demonstration of Newton's improved rule, which he called "the beautiful child of Newton's youth," seems to have satisfied his audience. Mr. Sylvester has long been known as a _mathematician of genius and eccentric views. He was convinced, -we have heard, at one time, by the Greek fallacy which affects to prove that "the flying arrow rests," showing of course that at .every successive instant each point in the arrow must be at some specific point of space, and then arguing—" but if at every in- stant, then always." Professor Sylvester was currently reported to accept this reasoning, and to explain it away by saying that every moving thing (or person) is destroyed at one point of space, and immediately created anew at the next,—an ingenious but toilsome hypothesis. _
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