Dr. Bowditch, President of the American Academy. xlv 
(as in numerous other instances) to that great French geometer, 
Le Gendre, by introducing the method of obtaining certain values 
by means of the Tables of Elliptical Integrals, computed by him. It 
has been a subject of regret, that, from any motives whatever, La 
Place should have omitted to do that justice himself to this distin- 
guished mathematician. 
On the other hand, the same spirit of justice, which influenced 
Dr. Bowditch in the case just mentioned, has led him in another 
part of the work (Book I. ch. 5) to vindicate the accuracy of La 
Place against the strictures of a writer in a celebrated European 
Journal, upon certain equations relating to the preservation of living 
forces and areas. 
In another place, however, he finds La Place to have drawn too 
general a conclusion (ch. 7, on rotary motion), where he gives an 
equation which he says is integrable only in the three cases there 
specified by him; whereas Dr. Bowditch demonstrates, that there 
are three other cases not mentioned by La Place, in which this in- 
tegration is possible by the same methods; and he then states them 
in detail. 
In an elaborate Note on the First Chapter of the Second Book, 
Dr. Bowditch gives a very complete, though extremely condensed 
view of the subject of Conic Sections, and in so generalized a form 
as to comprehend them all within the compass of two pages. 
The Fourth Chapter of the Second Book is upon the Computation 
of the Orbit of a Comet; and Dr. Bowditch, in his commentary 
upon it, when noticing Newton’s Principia, remarks upon a fallacy 
which had run through all the editions he had seen of that work, 
and had even been defended by Newton’s commentators as correct. 
This fallacy was noticed, many years ago, by Dr. Bowditch, in the 
Memoirs of the Academy, as I have before mentioned. * 
* Bowditch’s La Place, Vol. I. p. 460, note ; Mem. Amer. Acad. Vol.IV. p. 62. 
