131 



TRYPHIODORUS. 



TSCHIRNHAUSEN, EHRENF11IKD W. VON. 



182 



solicitor in Warwick-square, London, and Saffron Walden, Essex, was 

 born in 1782, and received his early education at St. Paul's School. 

 He was articled as a clerk in his father's office, and having been 

 admitted an attorney in 1805, practised for some years as partner in 

 the firm of Wilde and Knight, in Castle-street, Falcon- square. In 

 1817 he was called to the bar, and went the Western Circuit. Good 

 fortune attended him : ho speedily rose to eminence as an advocate, 

 and became leader of his circuit. In 1824 he was made a serjeant-at- 

 law, and three years later a king's Serjeant, and a vast accession of 

 business was the consequence. Under Lords Denman and Brougham 

 he was engaged as a junior in the defence of Queen Caroline, which 

 tended materially to increase his professional reputation, though it 

 retarded his advancement during the reign of George IV. In 1831 

 ho was elected member for Newark, against the influence of the late 

 Duke of Newcastle, and though thrown out in December 1832, he 

 regained his seat in January 1835, and retained it, as colleague with 

 Mr. W. E. Gladstone, until 1841, when he was elected for Worcester. 

 In 1839 he succeeded Sir R. M. Rolfe, now Lord Cranworth, as 

 solicitor-general, and became attorney-general in 1841. In 1846, on 

 the return of the Liberal party to power under Lord John Russell, 

 Sir Thomas Wilde was again nominated attorney-general, but within 

 a week afterwards was raised to the bench as chief-justice of the 

 Common Pleas on the death of Sir N. Tindal. In July 1850 he 

 received the great seal, and was at the same time elevated to the 

 peerage as Lord Truro. He resigned the chancellorship on the retire- 

 ment of his party from office in February 1852. The most memorable 

 causes in which he was professionally engaged before his elevation to 

 the judicial bench were the trial of Queen Caroline, alluded to above, 

 and the trial of the late Mr. O'Connell in 1844, to whom he gave his 

 services without fee or retainer to obtain a reversal of the decision of 

 the law courts of Dublin. In parliament his name is most perma- 

 nently connected with the great case of Stockdale v. Hansard, which 

 involved the constitutional question as to whether the House of 

 Commons had the right of publishing its reports without rendering its 

 officers thereby liable to proceedings in the courts of law. On this 

 question Sir Thomas Wilde took the affirmative side, and supported it 

 by a speech of more than three hours' duration, which Dr. Lushington 

 pronounced to be " the most consummate and masterly triumph of 

 legal reasoning ever known." The matter at issue, as is well known, 

 was eventually compromised by the introduction of a bill by Lord 

 John Russell, formally conferring upon the House that power which 

 it had hitherto claimed as a right. As a judge, the reputation of Sir 

 Thomas Wilde stood high : he was patient, painstaking, and impartial 

 in the highest degree. As lord chancellor, his judgments were 

 regarded with respect ; and though most of the cases brought before 

 him were appeals from the vice-chancellors' courts, whose decisions he 

 frequently reversed, yet of his own decisions as a judge only one was 

 reversed on appeal. The chief fault laid to his charge as lord chan- 

 cellor was an over-anxious and too elaborate dwelling on all the points 

 in an argument, without due regard to their relative importance. 

 Among other important public questions which were decided by him 

 in this capacity was that of the Braintree Church-rates. Lord Truro 

 was also eminent as a legal reformer. Whilst holding the chancellor- 

 ship he appointed a commission to inquire into the jurisdiction, 

 pleading, and practice of the court, the result of which was that a 

 bill was introduced and carried for the abolition of the twelve master- 

 ships, a step which reduced the annual fees of the court by 20,OOOZ. 

 By another act also, mainly promoted by Lord Truro, some other 

 offices were consolidated or abolished, and the practice of receiv- 

 ing fees by various individuals was suppressed to such an extent that 

 the estimated saving to suitors is 60,0001. a year. Among the other 

 legal reforms effected by Lord Truro was the appointment of the lords- 

 justices to relieve the chancellor of some of his judicial labours, and so 

 to enable him to give his attention to his duties in the House of Lords, 

 and as a member of the Cabinet without interruption to the law courts. 

 To hijn also the legal profession owes the reform of the Common Law 

 procedure, the professed object of which is to sweep away the anti- 

 quated technicalities upon which legal decisions were too frequently 

 based, and to insure that they shall henceforth be given according to 

 their own respective merits, "according to the very right and justice 

 of each case," as is more fully explained in Finlason's ' Summary of 

 the Common Law Procedure Act,' 1854. Lord Truro was twice 

 married : his second wife, who survives him, was Mademoiselle 

 Augusta Emma d'Este, daughter of H.R.H. the late Duke of Sussex. 

 He died at his seat, Bowes Manor, Southgate, Middlesex, on the llth 

 of November 1855, and was buried by the side of the late Sir Augustus 

 d'Este, in the Old Minster church at Ramsgate. 



TRYPHIODO'RUS (Tpv<pi6$wpos), a Greek grammarian and a poet, 

 who was a native of Egypt, and appears to have lived in the 6th 

 century, about the reign of the emperor Auastasius. Particulars 

 about his life are not known. We possess by him an epic poem of 

 681 verses on the destruction of Troy, which bears the title 'lAiou 

 SA.OXTJS (Excidium Trojte). The narrative of this poem is exceedingly 

 dull, and so much like a mere chronicle of events, that some critics 

 have thought the work to be only a sketch or outline drawn up by the 

 author with the intention of working it out into a longer poem. But 

 there is no reason for thinking that the author was capable of doing 

 much better things. This poem was first published, togetheuwith 



the works of Q. Smyrnaeus and Coluthus, by Aldus, at Venice, without 

 date. The best modern editions are those of J. Merrick, 8vo, Oxford, 

 1741, which contains a Latin translation in verse, by N. Fmchlinus, and 

 notes by various commentators ; of Th. Northmore, 8vo, London, 1791 ; 

 and lastly, that of F. A. Wernicke, 8vo, Leipzig, 1819 : this is the beat 

 critical edition, and contains most of the notes of former editors. 



Besides this poem, which is the only work of Tryphiodorus now 

 extant, he wrote various others, such as on the ' Battle of Marathon,' 

 on the ' Story of Hippodameia,' and on the ' Sufferings of Odysseus.' 

 This last poem, which is called 'OSwrtma \fiiroypd^/jMTos, is a strange 

 specimen of the low state of poetical taste at that time. The author, 

 according to Eustathius (' Ad Odyss.,' p. 1379), contrived to compose 

 this poem without making use of the letter t. (Compare Suidas, 

 a. v. Tpv(J}i65aipos.) 



TRYPHONI'NUS, CLAUDIUS, a Roman jurist, who lived under 

 Septimius Severus and his son Antoninus Caracalla. He wrote notes 

 on the works of Cervidius Scsevola, and twenty-one books of Diaputa- 

 tiones, from which there are excerpts in the Digest There is a rescript 

 of Antoninus to him (Cod. 1, tit. 9, s. 1), but whether in his capacity 

 of governor of Syria or as the agent of the Fiscus is uncertain. He is 

 cited once by Paulus. 



TSCHIRNHAUSEN, EHRENFRIED WALTHER VON, a cele- 

 brated German mathematician and philosopher of the 17th century, 

 was descended from a noble family, and born at Kieslingswald in 

 Upper Lusatia, April 13, 1651. Having received in his father's house 

 the elements of a scientific education, and evinced considerable 

 inclination for mathematical pursuits, he was sent at seventeen years 

 of age to the University of Leyden in order to complete his studies. 

 Here he became intimately acquainted with the Baron de Niewland, 

 who, being appointed to the command of a regiment in the war which, 

 in 1672, broke out between France and Holland, induced the young 

 Tschirnhausen to accompany him. as a volunteer. After serving 

 eighteen months in the Dutch army, his father recommended him to 

 travel, and he spent several years in visiting England, France, Sicily, 

 and Italy, returning to Kieslingswald through Germany, where he 

 passed some time at the court of the Emperor Leopold. During his 

 absence from home he found means to collect much information 

 respecting the subjects of natural philosophy, and it appears to have 

 been then that he investigated the nature of the curves which are 

 called caustics, and which have since borne his name. 



Dr. Barrow, in his optical lectures, had previously described the 

 manner in which the rays of light cross each other near the focus of a 

 reflecting mirror, but M. Tschirnhausen was the first who discovered 

 the curve to which the reflected rays are tangents. In a paper which 

 was read.before the Academie des Sciences at Paris in 1682, he showed 

 that the caustic formed by parallel rays when reflected from the 

 concave surface of a hemisphere is an epicycloid, but he fell into a 

 mistake in determining the relation between its abscissas and ordinates. 

 The properties of this curve were afterwards accurately investigated 

 by MM. De la Hire and Bernoulli. 



On his return to his native place he formed the project of making 

 burning lenses of great dimensions, but there being at that time in 

 Saxony no establishment for executing works of magnitude in glass, 

 Tschirnhausen obtained from the elector permission to form one, and, 

 this succeeding, two others were soon afterwards founded. The first 

 lens which he cast and ground was of the kind called double convex. 

 It was more than one foot in diameter, and its focal length was 32 feet. 

 He appeal's to have used it as a telescope, for he states that, without 

 either a tube or an eye-glass, he had seen through it the whole of a 

 town at the distance of about a mile and a half (about seven English 

 miles). Nearly at the same time he made a double-convex burning- 

 glass, 3 feet in diameter and 12 feet in focal length, which weighed 

 160 pounds. The diameter of the sun's image in its focus was about 

 14 inch, and by means of a small lens placed between the former and 

 the focus the diameter of that image was reduced to about two-thirds 

 of an inch. The effects produced by this mirror are stated in the 

 ' Me"moires de 1'Acade'mie ' (1699), and from the account it appears 

 that it was capable of burning wood when green, and even when wet ; 

 it melted thin plates of iron, and vitrified slate and earthenware. 

 This mirror was purchased by the Duke of Orleans, then regent, and 

 given to the academy. Tschiruhausen afterwards made a similar lens, 

 which he presented to the Emperor Leopold, and this prince in 

 return would have created him a baron of the empire. The philo- 

 sopher however declined the honour, accepting only a portrait of the 

 emperor and a chain of gold. He also made a concave mirror of thin 

 copper, about 4J feet in diameter and 12 feet in focal length, and the 

 effects produced by it, which were similar to those produced by the 

 glass lens, are described in the ' Acta Eruditorum,' Lips., 1687. It is 

 stated that the rays of the moon, being concentrated by the lens or 

 by the mirror, though they produced a brilliant image, gave no 

 sensible degree of heat ; and the like circumstance is related of the 

 lunar rays when concentrated by the great lens which was executed 

 in 1802 by Mr. Parker in London. 



The principles of the infinitesimal calculus were, in the time of 

 Tschirnhausen, not generally admitted among mathematicians, and 

 the Saxon philosopher was one who gave the preference to the more 

 elementary processes of the ancient geometry in researches relating to 

 the properties of curves. Entertaining the opinion that the most 



