194 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



an accurate remembrance of the nature of a beginner's difficulties, 

 and determined perseverance. The congratulations which this soci- 

 ety would so cordially have offered to the performer of this strikingly 

 useful task can now only be forwarded, with expressions of sympathy 

 and condolence, to his surviving relatives and friends ; with the hope 

 that astronomy, theoretical and practical, will flourish in the country 

 which has produced so remarkable a facilitation of the study of the 

 former, and so sound an example of the union of both." 



In a note to the memoir of Dr. Bowditch by his son, it is stated 

 that in America two, and perhaps three persons, besides Dr. Bow- 

 ditch, were able to read the original work critically; but a compe- 

 tent judge has doubted whether the whole of it had been so read even 

 by one. It is also known, on the authority of his son, that Dr. 

 Bowditch was gratified whenever he received assurances that his 

 work had made Laplace accessible to young students. — more even 

 than he was by the approbation of his peers. 



Benjamin Peirce, who was born in Salem, Mass., in 1809, and died 

 at Cambridge in 1880, and who was Professor of Mathematics or 

 Astronomy for forty-seven years, enjoyed the most intimate social 

 and scientific relations with Dr. Bowditch. How these relations 

 originated we are told by the writer of his obituary notice prepared 

 for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.* 



" In his early years he had the good fortune to come under the 

 influence of Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch. It is said that their first ac- 

 quaintance was made while Dr. Bowditch's son, Ingersoll, and young 

 Peirce were schoolmates. Ingersoll showed his comrade a solution 

 which his father had prepared of a problem that the boys had been 

 at work upon. Some error, real or conceived, was pointed out in the 

 work, which was reported by Ingersoll to his father. ' Bring me that 

 boy who corrects my mathematics ! ' was the invitation to an acquaint- 

 ance, the importance of which, in Professor Pierce's own estimation, 

 is told in the dedication, more than thirty years later, of his Analytic 

 Mechanics : ' To the cherished and revered memory of my Master in 

 Science, Nathaniel Bowditch, the father of American Geometry.' 



"Peirce entered Harvard College in 1825. As Dr. Bowditch was 

 now in Boston, having removed from Salem in 1823, and was pre- 

 paring the first volume of his translation of Laplace's Mecanique 

 Celeste for the press, it followed almost as a matter of course that the 

 college student was more influenced in his studies by him than by 



* Proceedings, vol. xvi. pp. 443, 444. 



