781 



LAMBERT, JOHN. 



LAMBERT, JOHN HENRY. 



782 



LAMBERT, JOHN, is said to have been born of a good family, 

 probably about 1620, and to have been educated for the bar. On the 

 breaking out of the contest between the king and the parliament, he 

 abandoned the study of the law, and joined the parliamentary army, 

 in which he id mentioned as holding the rank of colonel at the battle 

 of Marston Moor (2nd of July 1644). After distinguishing himself t 

 Naseby, with Cromwell in Scotland, at Worcester, and on other occa- 

 sions, and ri.-ing to the rank of major-general, the appointment of 

 Fleetwood on the death of Ireton (November 1651) to the chief 

 command of the forces in Ireland produced an alienation between 

 Lambert and Cromwell which was never wholly healed, although he 

 wag one of the officers whom Cromwell summoned in June 1653 to 

 take upon them the settlement of the government, and he was in May 

 1655 appointed by the Protector one of his eleven major-generals, as 

 they were styled, or commanders of the military forces in the several 

 districts of the kingdom. Lambert's district comprehended the five 

 northern counties of Durham, Cumberland, Northumberland, West- 

 morland, and Yorkshire. He took little part in public affairs however 

 during the life of the Protector. The most important part of Lam- 

 bert's career is comprised within the space of about twenty months 

 that elapsed between the death of Oliver Cromwell and the return of 

 the king. He became the soul of the confederacy of discontented 

 officers, which after the meeting of his first parliament, in January 

 1659, was formed against the new protector Richard, and which 

 speedily effected the deposition of that feeble and unambitious person- 

 age. [CROMWELL, RICHARD.] Lambert was now accounted the head 

 of the Fifth-monarchy Men, or extreme republican and Independent 

 party. On the breaking out of the Royalist insurrection in July, he 

 was sent by the Rump Parliament to suppress it, a business which he 

 performed with extraordinary vigour; but immediately after his 

 success he turned round upon the parliament, and, on its resistance to 

 his demands, dispersed it by military violence on the 13th of October. 

 The part taken by Monk however, and the falling away of their 

 ins on all hand*, soon reduced Lambert and the cabal of officers, 

 or Committee of Safety, as they called themselves, to extremities ; 

 and by the beginning of January 1660, having been deserted by almost 

 the whole of the forc with which he had set out for the north to 

 encounter Monk, he was seized by orders of the restored parliament and 

 committed to the Tower. On the 9th of April following he made his 

 escape from confinement, but Colonel Ingoldsby recaptured him at 

 1 laventry, on the 22nd of the same month, when he was already at the 

 head of a considerable body of horse, the greater part of which however 

 deserted him at the critical moment He was excepted from the Act of 

 Indemnity passed after the liestoiation ; but although he was in June 

 Taught to trial before the Court of King's Bench along with Sir 

 Harry Vane, Le wa, after bring found guilty, reprieved at the bar, 

 the distinction made between the two prisoners being expressly placed 

 by the judxn to the account of his comparatively dutiful and 

 submissive' behaviour in the course of the trial. He was eventually 

 banished to the Island of Guernsey, where he lived for above thirty 

 \> ir^. 



LAMBERT, JOHN HENRY, a distinguished philosopher of Gar 

 many, was a descendant from a family which had been compelled to 

 quit France in consequence of the persecutions caused by the revoca- 

 tion of the Edict of Nantes, and he was born at Mulhauseu in Upper 

 Alsatia, August 29tb, 1728. He was sent to a school in the town, 

 where he acquired the rudiments of a classical education; but the 

 want of means obliged his father, who was by trade a tailor, to with- 

 draw him from thence at an early age. At home however the youth 

 availed himself of every means in his power to preserve the knowledge 

 he had acquired of the Latin tongue ; and a great part of each night 

 was spent in reading such of the Roman authors as he could procure, 

 <ir in studying arithmetic and geometry ; the money for the purchase 

 of the books, and even of the candles by whose light they were read, 

 being obtained, it is laid, by the gale of drawings which he found time 

 to execute. 



A taste for literature and science in a young person so situated, did 

 not fail to attract notice ; but the only immediate advantage which 

 Lambert derived from that taste arose from the neatness which the 

 practice of transcribing had given to his handwriting : this qualifica- 

 tion procured for him an appointment as a clerk in the office of a 

 solicitor ; and he was afterwards employed, in a like capacity, by an 

 iron-master of the neighbourhood. At seventeen years of age he 

 became the secretary of Dr. Iselin at Basel ; and during the five years 

 in which he held this situation he omitted no opportunity of extending 

 his literary attainments. He then also began to acquire a knowledge 

 of philosophy and logic by the study of the works of Locke, Malle- 

 branche, and Wolf; and he zealously cultivated the mathematical 

 sciences, in which alone it is observed he found that the processes ol 

 investigation lead directly to truth. 



In 1749 his patron recommended him to M. de Salis, who was then 

 the President of the Swiss Confederacy, as a tutor to his children 

 and having obtained the appointment, he went to reside with the 

 family of that statesman at Coire. Being thus placed in a situation 

 congenial with bis taste, and having access to a considerable library 

 enjoying, moreover, the opportunity of conversing with learned men 

 he was enabled, while communicating inetiuction to his pupils, to 

 study the Greek, Italian, and French languages; and particularly to 



advance his knowledge of optics, <ostronomy, and philosophy. He wag 

 admitted at this time a member of the Physico-Medical Society of 

 Jasel, to whose ' Acts' he afterwards contributed several memoirs on 

 mathematical and physical subjects. 



In 1756 Lambert accompanied two of tho sons of M. de Salis to 

 ;he University of Gottingen, and proceeding from thence to Holland 

 and France, he returned in 1758 to Coire. At Paris he had an oppor- 

 tunity of conversing with some of the celebrated men of tho age, 

 particularly D'Alembert and Messier, by the former of whom he waa 

 afterwards recommended to the king of Prussia, Frederick III. He 

 quitted the family of Count Salis in 1759, and having been chosen a 

 member of the Electoral Academy of Bavaria, he went to reside at 

 Augsburg. lu 1763 he was employed as one of the commissioners in 

 settling the boundaries between the territories of the Valais and the 

 duchy of Milan ; and in the following year, in consequence of an 

 invitation from the king of Prussia, he proceeded to Berliu, where he 

 passed the remainder of his life. He was elected a member of the 

 Berlin Academy of Sciences, to whose ' Me'moires ' he made many 

 valuable contributions ; and he was also appointed Chief Councillor in 

 brie department of Buildings, on the establishment of a commission 

 for superintending the improvements of the kingdom. 



While in Holland Lambert published at the Hague a tract entitled 

 ' Les Propric'te's de la Route da la Lumien?,' c. (8vo, 1758), in which 

 he examines the path of a ray of light refracted in the atmosphere, 

 and points out some corrections which should be made, on account of 

 refraction, in determining the heights of mountains ; and in the fol- 

 lowing year he published at Zurich one which was designated ' Freye 

 Perspective.' But one of the most important of Lambert's works is 

 his ' Photometria, sive de Mensura et Gradibus Luminis, Colorum, et 

 Umbra,' which was published both at Leipzig and at Augsburg in 

 1760. In this treatise the author states, from his own experiments, 

 the quantities of light reflected from the exterior and interior surfaces 

 of glass, and he gives formulae for representing them. He compares 

 the brightness of illuminated objects with that of the body which 

 enlightens them ; and he discusses the brightness of the image formed 

 by a luminous object in the focus of a burniug glass. He calculates 

 the degrees of illumination on the different planets ; and he describes 

 instruments for measuring the intensities of differently-coloured 

 light 



In 1761 he published at Augsburg a valuable work entitled 

 ' Insigniores OrbitaD Cometarum Proprietates,' 8vo, in which are con- 

 tained a formula for determining, in a parabolic orbit, the perihelion 

 distance in terms of two radii veetores and the difference between 

 the anomalies, and one iu which, the orbit being any conic section, 

 th interval between two times of observation is expressed iu terms 

 of the two radii and the chord which joius their extremities. This 

 is usually called ' Lambert's Theorem,' and it was certainly discovered 

 by him, though Euler had, long before, given a like theorem for a 

 parabolic orbit. In the eame year Lambert published at Augsburg 

 a small work entitled ' Logarithmischo Recheusto3;le,' in which ara 

 proposed some improvements on Guntor's ' Scale ; ' and one entitled 

 ' Kosmologische Briefe ueber die Einrichtung des Welthaus,' 8vo, in 

 which he considers that the action of gravity extends to the fixed 

 stars ; and he expresses a conjecture that the solar system may be 

 only a system of satellites with respect to some celestial body. 



In 1764 was published, at Leipzig, in 2 vols. 8vo, Limbert's 

 philosophical work entitled ' Neues Organon;' this is divided into 

 four parts, of which the first contains the rules of thinking, and the 

 second is on truth considered in its elements ; the third is on the 

 external characters of truth ; and the fourth, on the means of dis- 

 tinguishing the real from the apparent. A sort of supplement to this 

 work was published by him at Riga in 1771, in 2 vols. Svo; it is 

 entitled ' Architektonik," and treats of the metaphysics of mathe- 

 matics ; the subjects being Unity, Number, Dimensions, Continuity, 

 Limits, and Infinity. 



The first mathematical work which Lambert published after he 

 went to reside at Berlin was his ' Beytriige zum Gebrauche der 

 Mathematik und deren Andweudung" (3 vols. Svo, 1765 to 1772). 

 This contains some profound investigations relating to the theory of 

 numbers, and a tract on trigonometry, with notices on what is called 

 tetragonometry ; in it are given also somo remarkable propositions 

 relating to the projections of the sphere. In the first of those years 

 he published ' Description d'une Table Ecliptique formant un Tableau 

 vrai de toutes les Eclipses, tant de la Lune que de la Terre ; ' and in 

 1770 appeared his 'Zusiitze zu den Lngarithtnischen und Trigouo- 

 metrischen Tabellen," Svo. He was joined with Bode, Schultze, and 

 Lagrange in the publication (1776), under the direction of the 

 Academy of Berlin, of a series of Astronomical Tables. 



Lambert also wrote H tract on ' Hygrometry,' which was published 

 at Augsburg in 1770 ; and he left one on Pyrometry, which was pub- 

 lished at Berlin, in 1779, that is, after his death; this last contains a 

 biography of the author, by Everhard. Besides these works Lambert 

 wrote numerous papers on scientific subjects, which were published 

 in the 'Aota Helvetica" and in the ' Me'moires ' of the Academy of 

 Berlin. Among the 'Acta' are his ' Tentamen ile Vi Caloris ejusrjue 

 Dimensioue ; ' a series which goes by his name, and which was after- 

 wards generalised by Lagrauge, and a 'Memoir on Vibrating Strings.' 

 The ' Me'moires ' of the Academy contain his papers on the In.com- 



