456 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



fessor De Morgan upon this very subject. Yet this very 

 book of Mr. Bentham is one of the ten placed by title at the 

 head of Sir William Hamilton's article on logic in the Edin- 

 burgh Review for April, 1833, is once or twice referred to in 

 the article, and, a dozen years later, in the course of the con- 

 troversy with De Morgan, Sir William alluded to this article 

 as containing the germs of his discovery. We may imagine 

 the avidity with which De Morgan, injuriously attacked, would 

 have seized upon Mr. Bentham's book if he had known of it. 

 It is not so easy to understand how Mr. Bentham, although 

 now absorbed in botanical researches, could have overlooked 

 this controversy in the " Athenaeum," or how, if he knew of it, 

 he could have kept silence. It was only at the close of the 

 year 1850 that Mr. War low sent from the coast of Wales a 

 letter to the " Athenaeum," in which he refers to Bentham's 

 book as one which had long before anticipated this interesting 

 discovery. Although Hamilton himself never offered expla- 

 nation of his now unpleasant position (for the note obliquely 

 referring to the matter in the second edition of his Discus- 

 sions is not an explanation), Mr. Blaine did (in the " Athe- 

 naeum for February 1, 1851) immediately endeavor to dis- 

 credit the importance of Bentham's work, and again in 1873 

 (" Contemporary Review," xxi.), in reply to Herbert Spen- 

 cer's reclamation of Bentham's discovery. To this Stanley- 

 Jevons made reply in the same volume (pp. 821-824) ; and 

 later, in his " Principles of Science " (ii. 387), this competent 

 and impartial judge, in speaking of the connection of Ben- 

 tham's work " with the great discovery of the quantification 

 of the predicate," adds : — 



" I must continue to hold that the principle of quantification 

 is explicitly stated by Mr. Bentham ; and it must be regarded 

 as a remarkable fact in the history of logic, that Hamilton, 

 while vindicating in 1847 his own claims to originality and 

 priority as against the scheme of De Morgan, should have 

 overlooked the much earlier and more closely related discov- 

 eries of Bentham." 



It must be that Hamilton reviewed Bentham's book without 

 reading it through, or that its ideas did not at the time leave 



