NATURE 



[March 3, 192 1 



or of science. There is no doubt that he devoted 

 an immense amount of trouble and consideration 

 to devising methods of bestowing his endowments 

 which should be really beneficial and not either 

 futile or pauperising. • 



There are many people who, through ignor- 

 ance and a low estinhate of human motive, sneer 

 at Carnegie's "free libraries," and foolishly 

 regard his generous gifts as mere vanity and self- 

 advertisement. Those who knew him, and, in- 

 deed, all who examine the record of his various 

 benefactions, are led to a different conclusion — 

 namely, that he carried out in his later years the 

 generous purpose of his early life, and aimed at 

 employing his wealth for the good of the com- 

 munity, with some kindly partiality towards the 

 men who had worked in his employ and those asso- 

 ciated with his native place. We cannot give 

 here the complete list and amounts of his bene- 

 factions, but to the Carnegie Corporation of New 

 York, "to promote the advancement and diffusion 

 of knowledge by aiding institutions of higher 

 learning and scientific research," he gave 

 25 million pounds, and it is not yet known what 

 further sum it may receive as his residuary 

 legatee. To the relief fund for men in his mills 

 he gave one million pounds; to establish, in the 

 United States, a pension fund for aged university 

 professors he gave three million pounds, and a 

 million pounds to pay the fees of poor students 

 in Scotch universities ; and another million to 

 improve the universities. To nearly three thou- 

 sand towns (many in Great Britain) Carnegie 

 gave library buildings at a cost of fifteen million 

 pounds. To establish the beautiful museum, 

 library, and picture gallery at Pittsburg, he paid 

 more than five million pounds. Including his hero 

 fund, his Peace Palace at The Hague, and many 

 minor gifts, the Carnegie benefactions, all told, 

 amount, according to the authoritative statement 

 of the editor of this autobiography, to something 

 more than seventy million pounds sterling (350 

 million dollars) — "a huge sum," as the editor re- 

 marks, "to have been brought together and then 

 distributed (in his lifetime) by one man." 



The gift in making which Mr. Carnegie tells 

 us he had a greater pleasure than he de- 

 rived from any other was that of Pitten- 

 crieff Park and Glen, together with King 

 Malcolm's tower and St. Margaret's shrine 

 — the paradise of his childhood— presented 

 by him to his native city, Dumfermline. The 

 final chapter of the book tells of Carnegie's visit 

 to the Emperor William, and the bitter disap- 

 pointment of the old man when, in 1914, he 

 found his faith in the Emperor as a man of peace 

 misplaced. 



NO. 2679, VOL. 107] 



The bare facts which we have mentioned ir> 

 this notice of Andrew Carnegie's autobiography 

 are transformed in their narration by the man 

 himself into a most engaging personal story^ 

 replete with revelations of worldly wisdom, 

 generous and upright character, and tender feel- 

 ing. It is, indeed, well worth reading. One of 

 America's greatest men — Elihu Root — in 1920 

 said of Carnegie at a meeting held in memory 

 of his life and work : 



"He belonged to that great race of nation- 

 builders who have made the development of 

 America the wonder of the world. He was the 

 kindliest man I ever knew. Wealth had brought 

 him no hardening of the heart, nor made him 

 forget the dreams of his youth. Kindly, affec- 

 tionate, charitable in his judgments, unrestrained 

 in his sympathies, noble in his impulses, I wish 

 that all the people who think of him as a rich 

 man giving away money he did not need could 

 know of the hundreds of kindly things he did 

 unknown to the world." 



E. Ray Lankester. 



Mathematical Papers of Huygens. 



CEuvres Completes de Christiaan Huygens. Tome 

 Quatorzi^me. Calcul des Probabilitds. Tra- 

 vaux de Mathematiques Pures ; 1655-1666. Pp. 

 v'-t-557. (La Haye : Martinus Nijhoff. 1920.) 



THIS volume contains Huygens 's celebrated 

 essay, " De ratiociniis in ludo aleae," and 

 various minor mathematical papers of his earlier 

 years. The theory of probability was founded in 

 1654, when a gambler who was interested in 

 mathematics proposed to Pascal some problems 

 connected with games of chance. Pascal cor- 

 responded with Fermat about one of these, the 

 '■problem of points," to which he attached the 

 greatest importance. Two players of equal skill 

 want each a certain number of points to win; if 

 they stop their game before it is finished, how 

 should the stakes be divided between them? 

 Pascal and Fermat came to the same result, but 

 gave different proofs. In the following year 

 Huygens was in Paris and heard of this, but he 

 neither met Pascal or Fermat, nor received any 

 information as to their methods. 



On his return home he lost no time in pre- 

 paring his treatise on games of chance, which 

 was published in Latin in 1657 as an Appendix 

 to van Schooten's "Mathematical Exercises," 

 and three years later in the original Dutch. The 

 treatise contains fourteen propositions. The first 

 three define the expectation of a player who has 

 ^chances of gaining a sum a and q chances of 

 gaining h, as {pa + qb)/{p + q). The six next pro- 



