Miscellanies. 215 



where his taste for astronomy first showed itself, and was sufficiently ad- 

 vanced to enable him to master the rules for the calculation of a lunar 

 eclipse j and his subsequent occupation as supercargo in a merchant ves- 

 sel sailing from Salem to the East Indies, led naturally to the further de- 

 velopment of his early tastes, by the active and assiduous study of those 

 departments of that great and comprehensive science which are most im- 

 mediately subservient to the purposes of navigation. It was owing to the 

 reputation which he had thus acquired for his great knowledge of nautical 

 astronomy, that he was employed by the booksellers to revise several suc- 

 cessive editions' of Hamilton Moore's Practical Navigator, which he after- 

 wards replaced by an original work on the same subject, remarkable for 

 the clearness and conciseness of its rules, for its numerous and compre- 

 hensive tables, the greatest part of which he had himself recalculated and 

 reframed, and for its perfectly practical character as a manual of naviga- 

 tion : this work, which has been republished in this country, has been for 

 many years almost exclusively used in the United States of America. 



" Dr. Bowditch having been early elected a Fellow of the American 

 Academy of Arts and Sciences at Boston, commenced the publication of 

 a series of communications in the Memoirs of that Society, which speedily 

 established his reputation as one of the first astronomers and mathemati- 

 cians of America, and attracted likewise the favorable notice of men of 

 science in Europe. 



"During the last twenty years of his life. Dr. Bowditch was employed 

 as the acting president of an Insurance Company at Salem, and latterly 

 also as actuary of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company at 

 Boston ; the income of which he derived from these employments, and 

 from the savings of former years, enabled him to abandon all other and 

 more absorbing engagements, and to devote his leisure hours entirely to 

 scientific pursuits. In 1815 he began his great work, the translation of 

 the Mechanique Celeste of Laplace, the fourth and last volume of which 

 was not quite completed at the time of his death. The American Acad- 

 emy over which he presided for many years, at a very early period of the 

 progress of this very extensive and costly undertaking, very liberally offered 

 to defray the expense of printing it; but he preferred to publish it from his 

 own very limited means, and to dedicate it as a splendid and durable mon- 

 ument of his own labors and of the state of science in his country. He 

 died in March last, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, after a life of singular 

 usefulness and most laborious exertion, in the full enjoyment of every 

 honor which his grateful countrymen in every part of America could pay 

 to so distinguished a fellow citizen. 



" Dr. Bowditch's translation of the great work of Laplace is a produc- 

 tion of much labor and of no ordinary merit : every person who is ac- 

 quainted with the original must be aware of the great number of steps in 



