REPRINTS FROM PUBLICATIONS. 



FROM THE BOSTON DAILY ADVERTISER, OCT. 7. 



AN editorial notice in the Boston Daily Advertiser, on the morning 

 of Oct. 7, said, 



"The death of Professor Benjamin Peirce is a great and national loss ; for 

 he was the Nestor of American mathematicians, and the historic transition 

 from the illustrious Nathaniel Bowditch to the present generation of mathe- 

 matical minds. And among these the son of the deceased, Mr. Charles 

 Sanders Peirce, is not so much the rising hope as he is the worthy heir of 

 great traditions. If Newton and Gauss are the greatest of modern mathe- 

 maticians, the late Professor Peirce's merits will rank with the marvellous 

 achievements of the Bernoullis, Euler, and Laplace. For not only has he 

 extended the field of mathematics, he has also re-surveyed the larger part of 

 the field, and by the introduction of new methods enabled his successors to 

 cover more ground in less time than was previously possible. This is shown, 

 even in his elementary treatises, in his treatise on analytical mechanics of 

 1857, and in his 'Linear Associative Algebra' of 1870. Had he chosen to 

 publish a selected edition of his mathematical works satisfactory to himself, 

 there is reason to believe that for centuries to come the world would not 

 willingly let them die. The layman's impression, that a science as precise 

 and formal as mathematics is necessarily dry and abstract, is not borne out 

 by Professor Peirce's works and his personal character. Both were to a 

 remarkable degree imaginative, speculative, and emotional. Both were filled 

 with that reverence which is the almost uniform result of having felt the 

 living pulse of everlasting truths. Nor has Professor Peirce's life been 

 spent in learned retirement. lie was among the teachers at Round Hill ; 

 since 1831 he has been one of the bright, particular stars of Harvard Col- 

 lege ; the Harvard Observatory was founded through his help ; he was next 

 to Bache the strongest man connected with the United-States Coast Survey ; 

 he helped in making the American Ephemeris an authority rarely challenged ; 



