THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN ENGLAND. 



233 



schools in its vicinity, the same number at each of the 

 two English universities, and perhaps four in Scotland, 

 we shall hardly exceed a dozen, and yet we are fully 

 persuaded that our reckoning is beyond the truth." 



The other opinion I am going to quote dates from more 6. 



Babbage's 



than twenty years later, and is contained in a pamphlet by ciiticisms. 

 Charles Babbage,^ who with Herschel and Peacock had 

 done much to introduce at the University of Cambridge 

 that knowledge of Continental mathematics which, accord- 

 ing to the Edinburgh Eeviewer, was so much needed. His 

 'Decline of the State of Science in England' (1830) was 

 directed mainly against the Eoyal Society, as the review 



1 Charles Babbage (1792-1871), a 

 native of Devonshire, well known 

 all over Europe through his calcu- 

 lating machine, was a very remark- 

 able and original man. He lived 

 during the age when the appli- 

 cation of machinery to manufac- 

 tures, trades, and arts produced 

 the great reform in the industrial 

 sj'stem of this countrj^, and his 

 talents, which might well have 

 been employed in promoting pure 

 science, were largely spent in solv- 

 ing problems of practical interest. 

 An account of these several pur- 

 suits and schemes is given in his 

 ' Passages from the Life of a Philo- 

 sopher,' London, 1864. Of his 

 analytical machine we shall have 

 occasion to speak hereafter (see p. 

 248). Of the beginnings of the 

 new school of mathematics at Cam- 

 bridge he gives the following ac- 

 count (p. 27). Having purchased 

 for seven guineas a copy of Lacroix's 

 'Differential and Integral Calculus,' 

 he went to his puVjlic tutor to ask 

 the explanation of one of his diffi- 

 culties. " He listened to my ques- 

 tion, said it would not be asked in 

 the Senate House, and was of no 



sort of consequence, and advised 

 me to get up the earlier subjects of 

 the university studies." Repeated 

 experience of this kind had the 

 effect that he acquired a distaste 

 for the routine studies of the 

 place, and devoured the "papers 

 of Euler and other mathemati- 

 cians scattered through innumer- 

 able volumes of the Academies of 

 Petersburg, Berlin, and Paris." He 

 then perceived "the superior power 

 of the notation of Leibniz." It 

 being an age for forming societies 

 for printing and circulating the 

 Bible at Cambridge, Babbage con- 

 ceived the plan of a society for 

 promoting mathematical analysis, 

 and to parody one of the many 

 advertisements he proposed to call 

 it a society for promoting " the 

 Principles of pure rf'ism {d being 

 Leibniz's symbol) in opposition to 

 the dosage (dots being Newton's 

 notation) of the university." The 

 most important result of this move- 

 ment was the publication in 1816 

 of a translation of Lacroix's treatise, 

 and of two volumes of examples in 

 1820. 



