312 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



3862. wrote never was published? It did so to me. The first thing 

 ever proposed to me was a treatise on mechanics for the U. K. S. 

 I wrote a few chapters, and, chancing to become a candidate for 

 what I now hold, I sent my MS8. in as a testimonial, and I 

 believe it greatly helped me. At any rate, I was picked out of 

 fifty candidates, being known to be only twenty-one last birth- 

 day. I think Brougham and Warburton were the people who 

 dared a thing so bold, considering the danger of making any 

 ventures in an institution beginning under so many evil eyes as 

 the University of London. Olinthiis Gregory was against it ; 



S , who always had a wonderful faculty of getting something 



against somebody, though he did not know me, and had never 

 seen me, either concocted or retailed to Stratford a story which 

 I never heard from elsewhere, namely, that my appointment was 

 the doing of Mr. Frend, then an acquaintance of mine of a few 

 months' standing, not on the Council, and at Cheltenham for 

 health all the time, and who learnt my candidateship and appoint- 

 ment from the newspapers at one and the same moment. 



Who shall escape ? Mark the following. In some journal in 

 1851, M. Bertrand, in a paper on the convergence of series, is 

 charged with suppressing what I had done on the same sub- 

 ject. It is hinted that he had used what I had done. The facts 

 are 



1. M. Bertrand invented a set of rules before he had seen 

 mine, so he says, and I believe ; his method has all the marks of 

 independent thought. After he had observed the identity of his 

 rules and mine, in effect and each to each, it struck him to try 

 a hint of a M. Raube, and he thereupon constructed a third 

 system. 2. He announced my rules in half a quarter-page of 

 translation from me, with inverted commas to every Hue, and 

 mentioned my name eleven times in his descriptions and com- 

 parisons. 3. He gave my book the date 1839 instead of 1842, 

 1839 being the date of the number in which the rules of con- 

 vergence appeared. 4. He sent me a copy of his paper as soon 

 as it appeared. 



What could he have done more ? Nevertheless, he is un- 

 blushingly charged with unfair suppression by a man who knew 

 nothing of my book but what he himself had told him, for he 

 (the critic) gives the wrong date of 1839. 



As to infinity, I hold i to be the infinite of infinites. 



For marks the change from + to , which oo does not. 



As we generally use DO, we admit oo 1 , which is not negative, 



