"Just look at these results: the operation of differentiating appears to have had the effect of diminishing the power of x by 1 (for example in the last case reducing x4 to x3), and at the same time multiplying by a number (the same number in fact which originally appeared as the power). Now, when you have once seen this, you might easily conjecture how the others will run. You would expect that differentiating x5 would give 5x4 or differentiating x6 would give 6x5."