456 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
fessor De Morgan upon this very subject. Yet this very 
book of Mr. Bentham is one of the ten placed by title at the 
head of Sir William Hamilton’s article on logic in the Edin- 
burgh Review for April, 18838, is once or twice referred to in 
the article, and, a dozen years later, in the course of the con- 
troversy with De Morgan, Sir William alluded to this article 
as containing the germs of his discovery. We may imagine 
the avidity with which De Morgan, injuriously attacked, would 
have seized upon Mr. Bentham’s book if he had known of it. 
It is not so easy to understand how Mr. Bentham, although 
now absorbed in botanical researches, could have overlooked 
this controversy in the “ Athenzeum,” or how, if he knew of it, 
he could have kept silence. It was only at the close of the 
year 1850 that Mr. Warlow sent from the coast of Wales a 
letter to the “‘ Athenzeum,” in which he refers to Bentham’s 
book as one which had long before anticipated this interesting 
discovery. Although Hamilton himself never offered expla- 
nation of his now unpleasant position (for the note obliquely 
referring to the matter in the second edition of his Diseus- 
sions is not an explanation), Mr. Blaine did (in the “ Athe- 
neum for February 1, 1851) immediately endeavor to dis- 
credit the importance of Bentham’s work, and again in 1873 
(“Contemporary Review,” xxi.), in reply to Herbert Spen- 
cer’s reclamation of Bentham’s discovery. To this Stanley- 
Jevons made reply in the same volume (pp. 821-824); and 
later, in his “ Principles of Science” (ii. 387), this competent 
and impartial judge, in speaking of the connection of Ben- 
tham’s work “with the great discovery of the quantification 
of the predicate,” adds : — 
‘“‘T must continue to hold that the principle of quantification 
is explicitly stated by Mr. Bentham ; and it must be regarded 
as a remarkable fact in the history of logic, that Hamilton, 
while vindicating in 1847 his own claims to originality and 
priority as against the scheme of De Morgan, should have 
overlooked the much earlier and more closely related discoy- 
eries of Bentham.” 
It must be that Hamilton reviewed Bentham’s book without 
reading it through, or that its ideas did not at the time leave 
