NA TURE 



193 



THURSDAY, JUNE 28, li 



THE EARLY CORRESPONDENCE OF 

 CHRISTIAN HUYGENS. 



OEuvres Completes de Christian Huygens publiies par la 

 Societe" Hollandaise des Sciences. Tome Premier : Corre- 

 spondance 1638-1656. (La Haye : Martinus Nijhoff, 

 1888.) 



NEVER before, we venture to assert, even in this age 

 of " complete editions," has so colossal a literary 

 monument been raised to the memory of a great man as 

 the edition of the works of Christian Huygens, of which 

 the first instalment now lies before us. In a huge and 

 splendid volume of 621 quarto pages, is contained the 

 correspondence, from his ninth to his twenty-eighth year, 

 of the " young Archimedes," as his friends delighted to 

 call him. Yet out of 2600 documents in the hands of the 

 Commission charged by the Amsterdam Academy of 

 Sciences with the superintendence of the publication, 

 no more than 365 have as yet been printed. Seven ad- 

 ditional tomes, at least as massive as that just now issued 

 from the press at the Hague, will be needed to bring to 

 completion the initial section of the comprehensive record. 

 The works of Huygens, edited and inedited, will follow, 

 with an elaborate biography, so that we may safely assume 

 that the present century will not see the end of an enter- 

 prise the pecuniary responsibility of which has been 

 generously undertaken by the Scientific Society of 

 Holland. 



We have nothing but praise to accord to the manner in 

 which it has so far been conducted. All selective diffi- 

 culties were indeed spared to the Commission ; for the 

 collection at Leyden was of such exceptional value that 

 their resolution to print everything it contained admitted 

 of no cavil, and was arrived at without hesitation. Room 

 was, however, left for discretion as to the manner of pre- 

 senting to the public the materials at their disposal ; and 

 it has been wisely exercised. The notes are elucidatory 

 without being obtrusive ; the prefatory remarks are few 

 and to the point ; the indexes (of which there are no less 

 than five) afford a satisfactory clue to a labyrinth of 

 close upon four hundred letters in Latin, French, and 

 Dutch, miscellaneous in their contents, and necessarily 

 chronological in their arrangement. They are of great and 

 varied interest. Scientific history, the dispositions and 

 modes of thought of " men of light and leading" in the 

 seventeenth century, the manners and customs of the 

 time, are all in turn illustrated by them ; above all, their 

 perusal offers singular advantages for studying the develop- 

 ment of the powerful and active mind of the protagonist 

 in the life-drama they partially unfold. 



Christian Huygens was born at the Hague, April 14, 

 1629. Every educational advantage which the age could 

 afford was showered upon him. His father, Constantine 

 Huygens, was distinguished as a statesman, a poet, a man 

 of letters, and a musician. Himself a product of the 

 most varied culture, he desired that none of the brilliant 

 faculties early apparent in his two elder sons should rust 

 in disuse. They were accordingly taught to sing and 

 play the lute as well as to compose Latin verses ; they 

 Vol. xxxviil— No. 974. 



attended the juridical lectures of Vinnius, and studied 

 mathematics under Van Schooten ; they were accom- 

 plished in dancing and drawing no less than in Greek, 

 rhetoric, and logic ; they travelled to see the world and 

 improve their manners ; they could, as occasion required, 

 play the courtier, or work as skilled mechanics. The 

 native turn of each was, however, different. Constantine 

 excelled in the lighter branches of literature ; Christian 

 promptly shot ahead of him in geometry. Study and in- 

 vention went, with him, in this direction, hand in hand. 

 Before he was seventeen, he had begun to strike out 

 original lines of investigation, and the promise of these 

 juvenile essays was discerned, among the first, by 

 Descartes. Mersenne about the same time opened a 

 correspondence with him, and predicted for him greatness 

 beyond that of the towering figure of Archimedes. 



He made his debut in print in 1651 with a treatise on 

 quadratures, to which he appended a refutation of the 

 theorems on the same subject of Gregory of St. Vincent, 

 with the unusual result of gaining (besides many admirers) 

 a friend in the person chiefly interested in the controversy. 

 The little book was received with acclamations of praise. 

 At once and everywhere, the genius <of its author was 

 acknowledged. The mathematicians of France, England, 

 and Germany vied with those of Holland in doing him 

 honour. He was lauded as " Vieta redivivus," placed on 

 a level with Pappus and Apollonius, hailed as the great 

 coming light of science. Yet it was not in pure mathe- 

 matics that his brightest laurels were to be gathered. 

 Many lesser men did more to help on the great revolu- 

 tion in method which signalized his age. He remained, 

 throughout its progress, constant to the ancient jnodels, and 

 looked on, indifferent or averse to changes the full import 

 of which he failed to realize. His extraordinary ability 

 was, however, never more conspicuous than in his suc- 

 cessful grappling with problems — such as that of the 

 isochronous curve — unapproachable by geometers of a 

 more common-place type without the aid of the calculus ; 

 and there is reason to think that, had he lived longer, he 

 would have reinforced his powers by its adoption. It 

 appears from a letter of Leibnitz to him, of October 1, 1693, 

 that he was just then, eighteen months before his death, 

 " beginning to find the convenience " of the infinitesimal 

 mode of calculation, and had gone so far as to express 

 publicly his approbation. 



The most interesting part of the correspondence now 

 before us refers to Huygens's observations on Saturn. 

 As early as November 1652, we find him making in- 

 quiries as to the best manner of preparing and polishing 

 lenses. Assisted by his brother Constantine, he prosecuted 

 the subject with a diligence for which he half apologized 

 to his learned friends, and which produced unwelcome 

 gaps in his communications with them. By the com- 

 mencement, accordingly, of 1655, he was in possession 

 of a telescope of 12 feet focal length, undoubtedly the 

 best produced up to that date. It showed him, not only 

 the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter, but — 

 March 25, 1655 — " aliud quid memorabile," unseen by 

 Fontana or Hevelius, namely a Saturnian moon, after- 

 wards named Titan, the sixth counting outward from the 

 planet, the first in order of terrestrial detection. He con- 

 cealed and endeavoured to secure his discovery, after the 

 fashion set by Galileo, in an anagram which was widely 



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