Votes. Ixxv 
your scientific countryman, Mr. Bowditch, has honored me. The numerous 
additions which accompany the text, and which, in their turn, deserve to be 
translated into French, are the more important, as they clear away the 
difficulties which the subject frequently presents, and moreover include 
whatever Mr. Bowditch and other geometers have added to the theory of the 
motions of the heavenly bodies.” 
His scientific correspondents in Germany were equally strong in their 
commendations of his work. 
Mr. Bessel, at Kénigsberg, in a letter of February 18th, 1836, observes : — 
“Through your labors, on the Mechanism of the Heavens, La Place’s work 
is brought down to our own time, as you add to it the result of the studies 
of geometricians since its first appearance. You yourself enrich this science 
by your own additions, for which special obligations are due to you.” 
Mr. Encke, at Berlin, in a letter of May Sth, 1836, characterizes the 
Translation as a work, “ which, by the depth of the researches with which 
it is accompanied, will insure to you a distinguished place among the as- 
tronomers who have employed themselves on the difficult branch of Physical 
Astronomy.”’ 
The reception of the work by the practical astronomers of Italy has been 
not less gratifying. I will only add an extract or two from letters of Mr. 
Niccolé Cacciatore, Director of the Royal Observatory at Palermo. 
In a letter of May 1st, 1836, he informs Dr. Bowditch, that he had been 
charged by the Royal Academy with the duty of making a report upon his 
work, which “had excited the enthusiasm of all who took an interest in the 
subject of it.” And in a letter of the same date, addressed to one of his cor- 
respondents in the United States, he expresses himself in the following strong 
language : — “The work of Bowditch is great, very great. After having made 
my Report upon it to the Academy, which was very brief, because I was obliged 
to confine myself to narrow limits, I placed it on my study table, and now 
make the reading of it my pleasant employment. I find in it much to reflect 
upon, and much to learn. Bowditch has filled up, and in a superior manner, 
the design of the Mécanique Céleste, and has, moreover, corrected certain 
blemishes which have been noted in that work. Those comments and those 
notes, in my opinion, place Bowditch at the head of living mathematicians.’’ In 
another letter to the same correspondent, of a later date, (September 21st, 1837,) 
Mr. Cacciatore says :— “In the enthusiasm of my admiration I have briefly 
