224 Miscellanies. 
ment, eet ane hardly any material difficulty either of conception or rea- 
soning unelucidat 
The progress a ner Bowditch’s last illness was so unremitting, that he was not 
able to complete the final revision of the whole of this great work. He had, how- 
On this great work Dr. Bowditch’ s fame, throughout the scientific world will 
ultimately rest. And, surely, the most lofty ambition could not desire a more sol- 
id and lasting monument—a monument, which will endure until that day of deso- 
lation shall arrive, when no one of the human family shall remain to contemplate 
the mighty fabric of those heavenly systems, whose structure and laws are inscrib- 
upon it. 
The long study of the French mathematicians, in connection with Dr. B.’s la- 
bors on La Place’s work, had given him a well founded partiality for the French, 
or Continental mathematical school, so far as that may be said to differ from 
English. And on one great question, which in the age of Newton raised such a 
differential calculus—Dr. Bowditch did not consider Newton as the exclusive dis- 
coverer, but, as the more candid of all parties now generally agree, that he and 
Leibnitz both h original discoverers of that wonderful method of analysis, and 
that neither of them was a plagiarist from the other, as each had been illiberally 
called while the controversy was raging. 
The poet of Dr. Bowditch was such, — = had Toe. many years been @ 
Of vieious: hertie’d actiotes th Kare and he was one of 
the few Americans who have been Fellows of ae gate Bickeey of London. In 
his native State he has been for some years the President of the American Acade- 
my of Arts and < iagehy which is.indebted to him for a large share of the reputa- 
tion it has enjo 
Such is a brief ontline of the intellectual character and — labors of this 
eminent man. It need only be added, that in social life he i for 
— integrity, extraordinary energy of character, and macnn zeal and perse- 
rar tever he undertook to accomplish his manner was ardent, and in- 
Sadie of that warm heart which has now ceased to — — those friends who 
enjoyed the happiness of his society ; his depertaell was, imary 
gree, unaffected and simple; and he had a frankness in cigoailiag his opinions, 
which an age of artificial civility would feel to be a persis reproof of its ow? 
heartlessness, and would hardly consent to rank among the v 
How saddening is the reflection, that these high caneiioned and moral endow- 
ments, from which we had fondly, perhaps a hoped for still further 
benefits to the world, should now lie powerless, prostrate, and in ruins before us! 
Never has there been an individual in our country, satel devoted to the 
of science and the tranquil walks of private life, and shunning the allurements of 
that: political notoriety which is the distempered and all-absorbing passion of the 
as, whose death has been more generally and deeply nia Be 
* Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit” — 
“We read his history in a nation’s eyes ;” 
ct eno of ee eat once a epotaneous home 
to 2 worth. 
“London Quarterly Review, or 47, July, 1832. 
