Lodge, a neat and pretty mansion.

Near it were groves of various trees, and the water of a strong spring murmured from the front down to a lake at the bottom of the hill.
This was Miss Spence's country-house. Here the wise and excellent Maria pass'd the best part of her time, and never went to any public place but Harrogate once a year. In reading, riding, fishing, and some visits to and from three or four neighbours now and then, her hours were happily and usefully employed. History and Mathematics she took great delight in, and had a very surprising knowledge in the last. She was another of those ladies I met with in my travels, who understood that method of calculation, beyond which nothing further is to be hoped or expected; I mean the arithmetic of fluxions.
Very few men among the learned can consider magnitudes as generated by motion, or determine their proportions one to another from the celerities of the motion by which they are generated. I question if the Critical Reviewers can do it (I am sure they cannot), though they have made so licentiously free with me. They may however pretend to know something of the matter, and so did Berkley, late Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland: yet that prelate, in reality, understood

no more of the method than a porter does, though he presumed to write against it, and the divine Newton, the inventor of it: I say it. But Maria Spence, in the 24th year of her age (at this time), was a master in the fluxionary way. She had not only a clear and adequate notion of fluxions, but was able to penetrate into the depths of this science, and had made sublime discoveries in this incomparable method of reasoning. She astonished me. I thought Mrs. Burcott and Mrs. Fletcher (mentioned in my first volume, p. 275.) were very extraordinary women, on account of their knowledge in algebra, and the sine answers they gave to the most difficult problems in universal arithmetic: but this sort of reasoning is far inferior to the fluxionary method of calculation; as the latter opens and discovers to us the secrets and recesses of nature, which have always before been locked up in obscurity and darkness. By fluxions, such difficulties are resolved, as raise the wonder and surprise of all mankind, and which would in vain be attempted by any other method whatsoever. What then must we think of a young woman well skilled in such work; — not only able to find the fluxions of flowing or determinate