COTA, Rodrigo, a Spanish poet of the 15th century, said to have been born at Toledo. Nothing is known of his life or death, saving that he was poor and of humble rank. To him is attributed the popular Copias de Mingo Revulgo, an anonymous pastoral satire against Henry IV. of Castile, which has been often edited and often imitated, and which is unquestionably one of the first attempts at dramatic poetry in Spanish literature. To him, too, is sometimes ascribed the authorship of a similar piece, the Dialogo entre el amor y un viejo. Besides these, he is supposed to have written the first act of the celebrated novel-drama, the Celestino. (1480), which was finished in twenty-one acts by Fernando de Rojas. For an account of the influence of the Celestino on the Castilian drama, and of the numerous editions, imitations, and translations of it, see Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vol. i. pp. 235—244.

COTES, Roger (1682-1716), an English mathematician and philosopher, born at Burbage, Leicestershire, of which place his father was rector. When only twenty-four years of age he was appointed Plumian professor of astronomy and experimental philosophy in the university of Cambridge. He took orders in 1713; and the same year, at the request of Dr Bentley, he published the second edition of Newton’s Principia with an original preface. He died June 5, 1716, at the age of thirty-three, leaving unfinished a series of elaborate researches on optics, in reference to which Newton observed, “If Mr Cotes had lived, we should have known something.” With regard to pure mathematics, the principal discovery of Cotes consists in a theorem which still bears his name, and which furnishes the means of integrating by logarithms and arcs of the circle the rational fractions whose denominator is a binomial. His papers were collected and published by his successor Dr Robert Smith.