694 Notes of tie Month on [DEC. 



read to the society ; circumstances which becoming known to the author 

 of the paper alluded to, caused him to hint to some members of the 

 council that their medals would not be acceptable, thus placing the 

 society in the disgraceful predicament of having its Copley medal refused 

 by the individual for whom it had been unwarrantably designed." 



So much for this learned Philomath's opinion of the case. The 

 decline and fall of science in this country, according to this sagacious 

 fellow, is assignable to the u giving of a medal, after the time estab- 

 lished by custom ;" and other such nonsense. The plain truth is, their 

 heads are running on medals, and the giving or withholding one of 

 those baubles is enough to throw the whole set of dabblers in diagrams 

 into a brain fever. 



Then we have Mr. Babbage, scribbling a pamphlet on the same wise 

 topic, and in exactly the same spirit " science is sinking in England, 

 science is gone," says this crabbed orator ; and why ? Mr. Dalton the 

 quaker did not get a medal, and Mr. Somebody else did. A medal was 

 given to the inventor of a new method of proving that lines which are not 

 parallel will meet at the world's end, while a medal was refused to the 

 much grander discovery that lines which are parallel never meet at all. 

 Mr. Babbage is just as much a medal-man as poor Sir James, and each 

 deserves the bauble about as much as a sixpenny almanac-maker, and 

 not a stiver more. 



The impudence of pretenders in all sciences is notorious. But the 

 half-learned mathematician always exceeds the whole class of coxcombry. 

 A man of the rate of Mr. Babbage naturally thinks that the world does 

 notcontain his equal, and that he is entitled to look down from his clouds 

 on all the orators, poets, divines and historians of the world. We fully 

 admit that mathematics are a great science, of the highest utility in 

 various practical departments of knowledge, and assistant to noble spe- 

 culations in natural knowledge. But the only claim on which any man 

 can call himself a mathematician, is his having added something to the 

 science, his telling what none knew before, his giving the world some 

 remarkable discovery in the principles of knowledge. 



But what discovery has any one of those conceited and noisy persons 

 made ? Nothing. If they write, they borrow from the French or 

 Italian mathematicians. The whole scientific production of those men 

 during the last quarter of a century has been plunder from foreigners. 



To come to particulars, what has Mr. Babbage done ? he has attempted 

 some slight addition to the old German calculating machine ; which has 

 stopped where it was many years ago, and no one has been the wiser for 

 the carpentry and brass, for the workmen were the true philoso- 

 phers on the occasion ; and at all events the machine has never been 

 more than a clumsy toy. Then comes Sir James South, who has made a 

 catalogue of the double and triple stars, a mere business of drudgery, 

 which any man might have gone through with a good common teles- 

 cope, and a yard of flannel round his throat to keep him from the night 

 air. Then comes Captain Kater, a prodigious man of science, who 

 knows the difference between a Gregorian and Newtonian telescope, and 

 has made some trivial mechanical improvement in the pendulum. There 

 rests his fame. Then comes Captain Sabine, who was sent out on a mis- 

 sion to ascertain the swings of the pendulum in the South Seas ; no man 

 could wind up a chronometer better, tell the world when it was twelve 

 o'clock, or know the difference between sunrise 'and sunset, the mean 



