OP ARTS AND SCIENCES. 191 



electricity, magnetism, and capillarity. By common consent, he stood 

 at the head of European analysts, after the death of Laplace, whom 

 he succeeded as geometer in the Bureau de Longitude. 



The publication of Dr. Bowditch's great work, a translation of four 

 volumes of Laplace's Mecanique Celeste, with an ample commentary, 

 was heralded by an article which he wrote for the North American 

 Review in 1820. After describing the works of Olbers and Gauss in 

 mathematical astronomy, the three principal publications of Laplace, 

 and especially his discovery of the great equation in the motions of 

 Jupiter and Saturn, with its long period of 917 years, and the neglect 

 by men of science in Great Britain of the vigorous science upon the 

 Continent, he thus expresses his admiration of Laplace: "These dis- 

 coveries, together with a multitude of improvements in analysis and 

 in every branch of mathematical knowledge, place this immortal man 

 far above any of his contemporaries in the walks of science."* Fourier 

 had called Laplace's works the Almagest of the eighteenth century. 



Professor John Playfair, having alluded to the absence of diagrams 

 and geometrical figures in the writings of the great mathematicians of 

 France, says : " If we come to works of still greater difficulty, such 

 as the Mecanique Celeste, we will venture to say that the number of 

 those in this island who can read that work with any tolerable facility 

 is small indeed. If we reckon two or three in London and the mili- 

 tary schools in its vicinity, the same number at each of the two English 

 Universities, and perhaps four in Scotland, we shall not hardly exceed 

 a dozen : and yet we are fully persuaded that our reckoning is beyond 

 the truth." t 



On the appearance of the first volume of Bowditch's translation, a 

 writer in the London Quarterly Review expresses his admiration in 

 these words : " The idea of undertaking a translation of the whole 

 Mecanique Celeste, accompanied throughout with a copious running 

 commentary, is one which savors, at first sight, of gigantesque, and is 

 certainly one which, from what we have had hitherto reason to con- 

 ceive of the popularity and diffusion of mathematical knowledge on 

 the opposite shores of the Atlantic, we should never have expected 

 to have found originated, or at least carried into execution, in that 

 quarter. Meanwhile, the part actually completed (which contains 

 the first two books of Laplace's work) is, with few and slight excep- 

 tions, just what we could have wished to see, — an exact and careful 



* North American Review, 1820, vol. x. pp. 200-272. 

 t Edinburgh Review, 1808, vol. xi. p. 281. 



