GEORGE BOOLE. 167 



give that remarkable impulse which algebraic language 1847. 

 has received in the interval from that time to the present. 

 . . . That peculiar turn for increasing the power of 

 mathematical language, which is the most characteristic 

 point of Dr. Boole's genius, was shown in a remarkable 

 way in his writings on Logic. Of late years, the two great 

 branches of exact science, Mathematics and Logic, which 

 had long been completely separated, have found a few 

 common cultivators. Of these Dr. Boole has produced 

 far the most striking results. In alluding to them we 

 do not say that the time is come in which they can even 

 be generally appreciated, far less extensively used. But 

 if the public acknowledgment of progress and of genius 

 be delayed until the whole world feels the results, the last 

 century, which had the lunar method for finding longi- 

 tude, ought to have sought for the descendants of Apollo- 

 nius to reward them for his work on the Conic Sections.' 



' Dr. Boole's system of logic shows that the symbols 

 of algebra, used only to represent numbers, magnitudes, 

 and their relations, are competent to express all the 

 transformations and deductions which take place in 

 inference, be the subject what it may. What he has 

 added may be likened to a new dictionary, by consultation 

 of which sentences written in the old grammar and syn- 

 tax of a system take each a new and true meaning. No 

 one is ignorant that the common assertion, " Nothing is 

 both new and true," is a perfect equivalent of " Everything 

 is either old or false, or both." Dr. Boole showed that 

 a schoolboy who works a certain transformation, such as 

 occurs in many a simple equation, has the form, though 

 applied to very different matter, of this logical passage 

 from one of two equivalents to the other. Taken alone, 

 this is a pretty conundrum, if any one so please. But when 

 looked at in the system of which it is a part, and when 

 further considered as the produce of a mind which 

 applied the same power of thought with rare success over 

 the whole of the higher Mathematics, those who so look, 



