Life and Character of Nathaniel Bowditch. 17 



that he owed it to his family to make the sacrifice of personal at- 

 tachments and preferences ; and for some time he and his amiable 

 consort fondly cherished the hope of returning and spending their 

 last days in the City of Peace. 



In March, 1798, just before sailing on his third voyage, he mar- 

 ried his first wife, Elizabeth Boardman, who died during his ab- 

 sence at the age of eighteen. In October, 1800, he was married 

 to his cousin, Mary Ingersoll, a lady of singular sweetness of dis- 

 position and cheerful piety, who, by her entire sympathy with 

 him in all his studies and pursuits, lightened and cheered his la- 

 bors, and by relieving him from all domestic cares, enabled him 

 to go on, with undivided mind and undistracted attention, in the 

 execution of the great work, on which his fame, as a man of sci- 

 ence, rests. He has been heard to say, that he never should have 

 accomplished the task, and published the book in its present ex- 

 tended form, had he not been stimulated and encouraged by her. 

 When the serious question was under consideration as to the ex- 

 pediency of his publishing it at his own cost, at the estimated ex- 

 pense of ten thousand dollars, (which it actually exceeded,) with 

 the noble spirit of her sex, she conjured and urged him to go on 

 and do it, saying that she would find the means, and gladly make 

 any sacrifice and submit to any self-denial that might be involved 

 in it. In grateful acknowledgment of her sympathy and aid, he 

 proposed, in the concluding volume, to dedicate the work to her 

 memory — a design than which nothing could be more beautiful 

 or touching. Let it still be fulfilled.* 



It is hardly necessary for me to say that this was a Translation 

 and Commentary on the great work of the French astronomer, 

 La Place, entitled " Mecatiique Celeste,'''' in which that illustrious 

 man undertakes to explain the whole mechanism of our solar sys- 

 tem, to account on mathematical principles for all its phenomena, 

 and to reduce all the anomalies in the apparent motions and fig- 

 lu-es of the planetary bodies, to certain definite laws. 



La Place himself, in his Preface, states the object of his work 

 as follows. " Towards the end of the seventeenth century, New- 

 ton published his discovery of universal gravitation, Mathema- 



* This noble-minded and excellent woman, whose unfailing cheerfLiIness and 

 vivacity rendered her admirably suited to be the wife of such a man, died in Bos- 

 ton, on the 17th of April, 1834, in the 53d year of her age. 



Vol. XXXV.— No. 1. 3 



