FROM THE NATION, NEW YORK, OCT. 14. 



THE name of Benjamin Peirce, who died in Cambridge, Oct. 6, has shed 

 lustre upon mathematics, and physics in America for many years. Born at 

 Salem, Mass., April 4, 1809, he was graduated from Harvard College at the 

 age of twenty, and two years afterwards was appointed tutor. For forty- 

 nine years he was directly connected with the Faculty of the College. 

 He published a series of text-books on pure mathematics, also a quarto vol- 

 ume on analytical mechanics, and a lithographed volume on linear and 

 associative algebra, besides making numerous contributions to scientific 

 periodicals, the proceedings of learned bodies, and the appendices of the 

 United States Coast Survey Reports. The enthusiastic admiration felt tow- 

 ards him by his intimate friends was due to his moral as well as to his 

 intellectual character. Making the concession that there was occasionally a 

 touch of intolerance in his manner towards pretentious mediocrity, they would 

 allow nothing in him to have been aught else than of the highest quality. 

 Persons who could not understand a word of his abstruse speculations were 

 compelled to listen to his earnest argument, and knew that his conclusions 

 must be important and true, even when they did not know what his conclu- 

 sions were. Successive classes complained of him that he did not make 

 himself plain to the ordinary understanding, that he was not a good teacher ; 

 yet they felt a potent influence from him stimulating them to higher efforts of 

 the mind and to a nobler moral stand. 



His published works are remarkable for the novelty or originality, both of 

 their lines of thought and of their methods. He was singularly direct and 

 clear : the only obscurity which is ever found in his writings is that which 

 arises from the omission of the simpler links in the chain of reasoning. But 

 to a well-grounded mathematician this very brevity becomes an efficient source 

 of perspicuity. No fog is more bewildering than verbosity, which never ap- 

 proached Peirce's writings. His mind moved with great rapidity, and it was 

 with difficulty that he brought himself to write out even the briefest record of 

 its excursions. In a mathematical society over which he presided for some 

 years, the contrast between him and the secretary, Professor Winlock, was as 

 noteworthy as the remarkable talent of both. The society comprised half a 

 dozen other men of some reputation in Cambridge and Boston, who met to 

 discuss purely mathematical topics. Each member would bring forth some- 

 thing novel in his own particular branch of inquiry ; and in the discussion 

 which followed it would almost invariably appear that Peirce had, while the 



