589 



regular and assiduous in the discharge of his duties. His life was 

 one uninterrupted course of usefulness and good purpose ; and he 

 died on the 27th of February, 1855, after enjoying that general 

 esteem and respect which render old age serene and happy. 



It is now more than sixty years since CHARLES FREDERIC GAUSS, a 

 young student resident in the city of Brunswick, hit upon an import- 

 ant theorem in the theory of numbers. His father was a brick- 

 layer in very humble circumstances, who was anxious that his son 

 should follow his own occupation ; but the extraordinary capacity 

 of the boy, at that time attending the National School, had attracted 

 the attention of Bartels, afterwards Professor at Dorpat and the 

 father-in-law of the great Astronomer Struve ; and it was upon his 

 recommendation that the reigning Duke, in spite of the opposition 

 of the father, provided him with the means of a good classical edu- 

 cation, by sending him to the Collegium Carolinum, and by many 

 subsequent acts of kindness and patronage. The proposition which 

 he had discovered, appeared to its author to be one of no ordinary 

 beauty ; and as he conjectured that it was connected with others of 

 still greater value and generality, he applied as he himself assures 

 us all the powers of his mind to find out the principles upon which 

 it rested and to establish its truth by a rigid demonstration. 

 Having fully succeeded in this object, he felt himself so completely 

 fascinated by this class of researches, that he found it impossible to 

 abandon them, and he was thus conducted from one truth to another, 

 until he had finished the greatest part of the first and most original, if 

 not the greatest, of his works, before he had read the writings of any 

 of his precursors in this department of science, more especially those 

 of Euler and La Grange. The subsequent study of the arithmetical 

 researches of these great masters of analysis could hardly fail to expose 

 him to the mortification which young men of premature and creative 

 genius have so often experienced, of finding that they have been anti- 

 cipated in some of their finest speculations. So far, however, from 

 being repelled by this discovery, " I became," says he, "animated with 

 fresh ardour, and by treading in their footsteps, I felt fortified in my 

 resolution to push forward the boundaries of this wide department of 

 science." The crowning result of his labours was, as is well known, 

 the complete solution of binomial equations, and a most unexpected 



