He first wrote satire in 1697, when he answered Dr John Woodward's "An essay towards a natural history of the earth and terrestrial bodies, especially minerals..." with "An Examination of Dr Woodward's Account &c." He poked fun at the arrogance of the work and Woodward's misguided, Aristotelian insistence that what is theoretically attractive must be actually true. In 1701, Arbuthnot wrote another mathematical work, "An essay on the usefulness of mathematical learning, in a letter from a gentleman in the city to his friend in Oxford." The work was moderately successful, and Arbuthnot praises mathematics as a method of freeing the mind from superstition.