ECONOMY OF LABOUR IN MATHEMATICS 205 



jumping-off stage for the next advance ; but such a method 

 does not seem to harmonise with the British temperament, 

 which prefers to ignore past discoveries, and to begin each 

 time from the original position. 



How much has been lost by British methods can hardly be 

 estimated, but the present writer has in mind numerous cases 

 which have occurred (in his own narrow experience) of logar- 

 ithmic and trigonometric tables to many decimals, of tables 

 of primes, interest and mortality tables, tables of Gamma, 

 Bessel, and other functions which have been recalculated 

 because the investigator had no means of finding out if the 

 work had been previously done, and where it could be obtained. 



Numerous cases will occur to the mind of those at all 

 familiar with the history of mathematical progress. De 

 Morgan in a letter to Hamilton says, "lam perfectly surprised 

 to find a fundamental method of Newton followed up by 

 Lagrange, unknown to everybody I ever come in contact 

 with, whether in books, or speech, or writing." 



There are people, it is true, who seem to be under the im- 

 pression that all valuable matter is retained, and that everything 

 important in foreign literature makes its way into English. 

 But this is not so, and the production in English is so belated 

 that the influence the work might have is lost. One hundred 

 years after the publication of Laplace's Essai philosophique 

 sur les Probability, it has been translated into English by 

 the Americans, and Lagrange's great work, the Mecanique 

 analytique, which Hamilton called a scientific poem, has 

 never been printed in English. 



It is not only the work of the greatest men, but also of the 

 less great men, that requires attention. 



In any History of Mathematics men such as Sir Isaac 

 Newton will necessarily take up a large amount of space, but, 

 as De Morgan says, they should not take up all the space. 

 Room should be left for the minor men, who have collected 

 and formed the material out of which the greatest scientists 

 have erected their wonderful edifice. 



One of such minor men (if indeed this is not too low a term) 

 was Michael Dary, a contemporary of Newton, who writes to 

 him, and subscribes himself " your loving friend," which 

 perhaps ought of itself to be sufficient to rescue Dary from 

 oblivion. 



