450 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



without scaffolding on the ground that the scaffolding is not 

 part of the building " (Mind, 25, 1916, p. 526). 



In both his chosen fields of endeavour Mr. Jourdain had 

 built up for himself a well-deserved reputation by his con- 

 tributions to an exceptionally wide range of learned journals. 

 His death came at a moment when he was at the height of his 

 power : he had just claimed to have discovered a proof of the 

 very first importance in mathematical logic, that any aggre- 

 gate can be well-ordered ; he was publishing in Mind impor- 

 tant papers on " Causality, Induction and Probability " ; and 

 he was engaged on a monumental work on The History of 

 Mathematical Thought. From what has been already frag- 

 mentarily published of this latter work, and from the mass 

 of material found amongst his papers, it is clear that this was 

 to be no mere anecdotage of mathematicians but a true history 

 of the conceptions of mathematics. 



But Mr. Jourdain 's death was untimely also in a less per- 

 sonal, and therefore in what he himself would have regarded 

 as a more important, sense. For he had been working for 

 some time towards the realisation of two great schemes. The 

 first was the foundation of a " Literary Entente " whereby the 

 whole of the contributions of all nations to the advancement 

 of science was to be translated into English and French ; and 

 the other was for the publication of what might stand for a 

 national edition of Newton. He considered it to be nothing 

 short of a disgrace that, while France and Italy had paid due 

 respect to their great men in the national editions of Pascal 

 and Galileo, the man whose genius was greater even than these 

 should have been neglected. Mr. Jourdain was the greatest 

 living authority on Newton ; he had already done a vast 

 amount of research himself, and it is hoped that some of this 

 — together with his other unpublished work — will be issued 

 posthumously. 



In 191 2 the late Dr. Paul Carus, whilst on a visit to the 

 International Congress of Mathematicians at Cambridge, 

 appointed Mr. Jourdain English Editor of the Monist. By this 

 happy choice Dr. Carus was able to open up an extended 

 sphere of influence for that Journal, and for the philosophical 

 and scientific publications of the company of which he was the 

 head. A few years later Mr. Jourdain became English Editor 

 also of the International Journal of Ethics. 



The series of valuable summaries of " Recent Advances in 

 Mathematics," which Mr. Jourdain contributed to Science 

 Progress, began in January 191 6. The task of presenting a 

 complete, and yet not too thin, abstract of the mass of new 

 work — scattered over the widely diverse and specialised fields 

 into which modern mathematics has split up — is one of ex- 



