977 



BINGHAM, JOSEPH. 



BONSTETTEN, KARL VICTOR VON. 



978 



The following anecdotes were related by himself, and he asserted 

 that bis self-love was more flattered by tho incidents they contain 

 than by all his prizes. When lie was a young man on his travels, he 

 talked with a stranger whose curiosity was excited by his conversation, 

 and who asked his name. " I am Daniel Bernoulli," answered he. 

 The stranger, thinking from his youthful looks that he could not be so 

 celebrated a man, and wishing to answer the supposed hoax by one 

 still better, replied, "And I am Isaac Newton." The other is as 

 follows: Koenig, then well known as a mathematician, was dining 

 with him, and talking with some pride of a very difficult question, 

 which it had taken him a long time to solve ; Bernoulli went on 

 attending to his guests, and before they rose from table furnished 

 Koenig with a solution of his question. (See the ' Eloge ' of Daniel 

 Bernoulli by Condorcet.) 



JOHN BERNOULLI II., third son of John Bernoulli I., born at Basel, 

 May 18, 1710, died there July 17, 1790. He studied law and mathe- 

 matics, and was successively professor of eloquence and of mathe 

 matics. Three of his memoirs gained the prize of the Academy of 

 Sciences. 



JOHN BERNOULLI III., his son, born at Basel, November 4, 1744, 

 died at Berlin, July 13, 1807. At nineteen years of age he became a 

 member of the academy of Berlin. He devoted himself particularly 

 to astronomy, and his numerous observations are in the Berlin ' Me- 

 moirs ' and ' Ephemerides.' He gave an edition of the algebra of 

 Euler: his 'Lettres sur differents sujects,' &c., 1777 1779, contain 

 much information on the state of observatories. There is a list of his 

 works in the ' Biographie Universelle.' 



JAMES BERNOULLI II., second son of John Bernoulli II., born at 

 Basel, October 17, 1759, was the deputy of his uncle Daniel in his 

 professorship, when the latter became infirm, but did not succeed him, 

 owing to candidates being then chosen by lot. He was afterwards pro- 

 fessor of mathematics at St. Petersburg, and married a grand-daughter 

 of Euler. His memoirs in the Petersburg transactions had begun to 

 show that he had the talent of his predecessors, but he died of 

 apoplexy while bathing in the Neva, July 3, 1789. His ' eloge ' is in 

 the 'Nov. Act. Petropol.' vol. vii. ('Biog. Univ.') 



NICOLAS BERNOULLI I., nephew of the two first Bernoullis, was 

 born at Basel, October 10, 1687, died there November 29, 1759. He 

 was professor of mathematics and logic at Padua, afterwards of law 

 at Basel. There are some of his writings among those of John 

 Bernoulli. 



In concluding this article we shall remark that the two elder Ber- 

 noullis lived during the time while the mathematics were in a state of 

 growth towards the power which was required for physical analysis. 

 No two men contributed more to this work ; and it is the integral 

 calculus, as received from their hands, which became the instrument 

 of their successors. They are .of the age of Newton and Leibnitz : 

 Daniel Bernoulli, on the other hand, is the contemporary of Clairaut, 

 Euler, and D'Alembcrt; and in the hands of these four, the new 

 calculus was applied to investigation of material phenomena. The 

 circumstances of the times required such men, and there is no question 

 that they must have appeared ; but that they should all three have 

 come from one family was not to be looked for, and furnishes an 

 instance of consanguinity of talent of one kind, which must excite the 

 curiosity even of those who care little for the subjects on which it was 

 employed. 



BINGHAM, JOSEPH, a very learned clergyman, was born in 

 September 1668, at Wakefield, Yorkshire, and educated first at the 

 grammar-school of his native town, whence he removed, in 1683, to 

 University College, Oxford. He graduated B.A. in 1687, was soon 

 after elected Fellow of his college, and in 1690 proceeded M.A. In 

 1696 he was presented to the rectory of Headbourne- Worthy, near 

 Winchester, Hampshire; and in 1712 to that of Havant, near Ports- 

 mouth. He obtained no further preferment; and died, August 17, 

 1723. The work on which the fame of Bingham is based is his 

 ' Origines Ecclesiasticce ; or the Antiquities of the Christian Church,' a 

 work displaying a profound acquaintance with the Fathers and early 

 ecclesiastical historians, and marked by sound judgment as much as 

 by extensive reading. It embraces within its scope nearly the whole 

 range of questions connected with the doctrines and discipline of the 

 early Church, and is unquestionably one of the most learned works on 

 Christian antiquity produced by a member of the English Church. It 

 was originally published in 10 vols. 8vo, 1710-22; and was translated 

 into Latin the citations being for the first time given at length by 

 Grischovious, with a preface by J. F. Buddeus, in 10 vols. 4to, Halse, 

 1724-29, and again in 1751-81. An edition, in which the additions and 

 corrections left by Bingham were for the first time incorporated, was 

 published by his great-grandson, the Rev. Richard Bingham (who pre- 

 fixed a Life of the author), in 8 vols. 8vo, 1821-29. Another edition, 

 by the Rev. J. R. Pitman, appeared in 9 vols. 8vo, London, 1838-40, in 

 which the passages referred to are given at length, and some Sermons ; 

 ' The French Church's Apology for the Church of England/ which 

 first appeared in 1706 ; ' A Scholastic History of Lay Baptism,' in two 

 parts, first published in 1712 ; and other minor works by Bingham are 

 included. The latest edition is one by R. Bingham, jun., in 10 vols, 

 8vo, Oxford, 1855, in which the editor has verified and quoted the 

 whole of the 15,000 citations contained in the work of his learned 

 ancestor. An abridgment of the Antiquities, by A. Blackamore, 

 BIOG. DIV. VOL. VI. 



appeared in 2 vols. 8vo, in 1722, under the title of ' Ecclesiaj Primitive 

 Notitia, or a Summary of Christian Antiquities." 



BONSTETTEN, KARL VICTOR VON, a Swiss author, a native of 

 the German portion of Switzerland, who wrote in both French and 

 German, and produced works of reputation in each language, and 

 who was also remarkable for the number and intimacy of his friend- 

 ships with noted men, one of whom was the English poet Gray. He 

 was born at Bern, on the 3rd of September 1745, of one of the six 

 privileged patrician families of that republic, of which his father was 

 treasurer. He was the first Bernese child who was subjected to inocu- 

 lation, by the advice of the celebrated Haller. At Yverdun, where 

 he was sent for his education, he formed an acquaintance with Jean 

 Jacques Rousseau ; at Geneva, to which he removed, he became the 

 friend of Firmin Abauzit, the Arian philosopher ; and was a frequent 

 guest at the table of Voltaire. Charles Bonnet, author of the ' Con- 

 templations of Nature,' inspired him with a taste for metaphysical 

 analysis, which he afterwards said decided the course of his intellectual 

 life. He took a disgust to Leyden, to the university of which he was 

 sent for his education, and obtained his father's permission in 1769 to 

 make a trip to England. Here the Rev. Norton Nicholls, of Blunde- 

 ston in Suffolk, the friend of Gray, chanced to meet with him at the 

 rooms at Bath, and introduced him, in a letter dated November the 

 27th, 1769, to the poet, who then resided in much retirement at Cam- 

 bridge. The consequence was what Mitford calls "a sudden intimacy 

 and romantic attachment " on the part of Gray, the history of which 

 may be traced in the letters between Gray, Bonstetten, and Nicholls, 

 first published by Mitford in 1843, in the fifth or supplementary 

 volume of his edition of Gray ; and in the letters from Gray to 

 Bonstetten, first given to the English public in 1799 in Miss Plumptre's 

 translation of Matthisson's ' Letters from the Continent,' the name 

 which she gives to the German poet's 'Erinnerungen.' These 

 letters it is interesting to compare with Bonstetten's own account of 

 this part of his life, as given in his 'Souvenirs,' written in 1831, 

 more than sixty years afterwards. " I passed some months," he saya, 

 "at Cambridge with Gray. I used to see him every day, from five 

 o'clock till midnight. We read together Shakspere, whom he adored, 

 Dry den, Pope, Milton, &c. I told him all about myself and my 

 country, but all his life was shut from me : he never spoke to me of 

 himself." " The remembrance of his poems," Bonstetten also says, 

 " was hateful to him ; he never permitted me to speak of them." When 

 the young foreigner left for the Continent, Gray accompanied him to 

 London and Dover ; and it was on this occasion that an incident took 

 place not without its interest. " Bonstetten told me," says Sir Egerton 

 Brydges in his autobiography, published in 1834, "that when he was 

 walking one day with Gray in a crowded street of the city, about 

 1769, a large uncouth figure was rolling before them, upon seeing 

 which, Gray exclaimed, with some bitterness, 'Look, look, Bonstetten ! 

 the great bear there goes Ursa major ! ' This was Johnson." lu 

 the letters which Gray wrote to his friend after his return, his lan- 

 guage was that of the warmest friendship. "My life now," he says in 

 one of them, "is but a conversation with your shadow; the sound of 

 your voice still rings in my ears." In his letters to Norton Nicholls, 

 while he expresses his warm attachment to the young Swiss, whom he 

 calls "the boy," though he was twenty-four years of age, he gives 

 utterance more than once to an opinion that he is " diseased in hia 

 intellects," and "certainly mad." In the year after their parting, 

 1771, Gray intended to pay him a visit in Switzerland, in compliance 

 with a warm invitation, but was prevented by the ill health which 

 resulted the same year in his death. Sir Egerton Brydges, who knew 

 Bonstetten about half a centui-y later, and who describes him as 

 " talkative and conceited, but amusing, and, in the common sense, 

 amiable," adds, "he was more like a Frenchman than a German Swiss; 

 I cannot guess how he could be suited to Gray." 



Soon after his return home, in 1773, Bonstetten became acquainted 

 with Johann von Muller, then an unknown young Swiss, afterwards 

 the celebrated historian ; and one of the most interesting volumes of 

 Miiller's works, the ' Briefe eines jungen Gelehrten ' (Letters of a 

 Student), consists of his correspondence with Bonstetten, who had a 

 great influence in directing the mind of his friend in the career which 

 led him to fame. The same service which he rendered to Muller was 

 rendered to himself by Matthisson, a poet who aspired to emulate 

 Gray in German, and with whom Bonstetten remarks that he lived on 

 the same terms of intimacy as with Gray, though his English friend 

 was thirty years older than himself and his German friend sixteen 

 years younger. By Matthisson's persuasion, Bonstetten commenced 

 author; and his first production, 'Letters on a Swiss Pastoral Country,' 

 published in a German magazine (' Wielands Deutsches Merkur ') in 

 1780, was of such excellence that he never surpassed and seldom 

 equalled it in his subsequent writings. Bonstetten had by this time 

 entered on political life in his native republic; but his ideas were 

 considered too liberal by his colleagues, and his way of supporting 

 them too little conciliatory, and he was also found not to be a good 

 ' man of business.' He was named however in 1787 Landvogt, or 

 political chief, of Nyon, and afterwards supreme judge at Lugano, in 

 Italian Switzerland. In his castle of Nyar, commanding one of the 

 finest views in Europe, he had the satisfaction of providing a lodging 

 for some years for his friend Matthisson, who \\rote there some of his 

 finest poems. When the spirit of revolution extended from France to 



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