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Life and Character of Nathaniel Bowditch. 17 
that he owed it to his family to make the sacrifice of personal at- 
tachments and preferences ; and for some time he and his amiable 
consort fondly cherished the hope of returning and apendling: their 
last days in the City of Peace. 
In March, 1798, just before sailing on his third voyage, he matr- 
ried his first wife, Elizabeth Boardman, who died during his ab- 
sence at the age of eighteen. In October, 1800, he was married 
to his cousin, Mary Ingersoll, a lady of singular sweetness of dis- 
position and cheerful piety, who, by her entire sympathy with 
him in all his studies and pursuits, lightened and cheered his la- 
bors, and by relieving him from all domestic_eares, enabled him 
to go on, with undivided mind and undistracted attention, in the 
execution of the great work, on which his fame, as a man of sci- 
ence, rests. He has been beni to say, that he never should have 
accomplished the task, and published the book in its present ex- 
tended form, had he not been stimulated and encouraged by her. 
When the serious question was under consideration as to the ex- 
pediency of his publishing it at his own cost, at the estimated ex- 
pense of ten thousand dollars, (which it actually exceeded,) with 
the noble spirit of her sex, she conjured and urged him to go on 
and do it, saying that she would find the means, and gladly make 
any sacrifice and submit to any self-denial that might be involved 
in it. In grateful acknowledgment of her sympathy and aid, he 
proposed, in the concluding volume, to dedicate the work to her 
memory—a design than which nothing could be more beautiful 
or touching. Let it still be fulfilled.* 
It is hardly necessary for me to say that this was a Trattalationy 
and Commentary on the great work of the French astronomer, 
La Place, entitled “ Mécanique Céleste,” in which that illustrious 
man undertakes to explain the whole mechanism of our solar sys- 
tem, to account on mathematical p principles for all its phenomena, _ 
and to reduce all the anomalies in the apparent motions and fig- 
ures of the planetary bodies, to certain definite laws. 
La Place himself, in his Preface, states the object of his work 
as follows. “'Towards the end:of the seventeenth century, New- 
aes his discovery of universal gravitation. Mathema- 
* This ca euies and excellent woma n, , whose entiting Gicertalsoes and 
vivacity rendered her many Bini in be to be the wife of such a man, died in Bos- 
~*~ on the 17th of April, ‘ in the 53d year of her age. 
Vou. XXXV.—No. 3 
‘. ‘ =” 
