424 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. I., No. 15. 



Morgan immediately addressed a letter to the 

 council, saj'ing that he considered it discredit- 

 able to hold a professorshij) one moment longer 

 in a college in which a professor might be re- 

 moved and disgraced without any fault on his 

 part. His resignation was accepted ; but, 

 after five j^ears of private teaching and volumi- 

 nous writing, he returned to his university. 

 The sudden death of his successor at the end 

 of a summer vacation induced him to offer to 

 fill the vacancy until Christmas ; and his belief, 

 that, owing to changes in the management, 

 his former objections to holding office would 

 not recur, led him to accede to the request of 

 the council that he should permanently resume ' 

 his chair. 



De Morgan's life is chiefly a record of his 

 labors and his publications. He gave regularly 

 twelve lectures everj- week, besides occasional 

 extra courses ; and for half an hour after each 

 lecture he remained in his place to give personal 

 assistance to those students who needed it. 

 This, with an honr for correcting exercises, 

 made four hours of solid work for each day in 

 the week, without counting the time required 

 for preparation. As a lecturer, he showed un- 

 rivalled skill. Mr. Sedley Taylor writes, " His 

 exposition combined excellences of the most 

 varied kinds. It was clear, vivid, and suc- 

 cinct ; rich, too, with abundance of illustration, 

 always at the command of enormouslj- wide 

 reading and an astonishingij' retentive memory. 

 A voice of sonorous sweetness, a grand fore- . 

 head, and a profile of classic beauty, intensified 

 the impression of power . . . which he made 

 upon his auditors." He had a great hatred of 

 cram, and no confidence in the power of an 

 examination to determine the true value of a 

 student's knowledge. " The claims which col- 

 lege examinations might be supposed to have 

 on the studies of his pupils were never allowed 

 to influence his programme in the slightest de- 

 gree." He wrote the following in illustration 

 of a Cambridge examination : — 



Q. — What is knowledge ? 



A. — A thing to be examined in. 



Q. — What must those do who would show 

 knowledge ? 



A. — Get up subjects, and write them out. 



Q. — ^ What is getting up a subject? 



A. — Learning to write it out. 



Q. — What is writing out a subject? 



A- — Showing that j'ou have got it up. 



The list of De Morgan's publications is a 

 very long one. Much of his writing was of a 

 kind which it is extremelj^ useful to have done 

 at the time and to have well done, but which is 

 not destined to be preserved, and which it is 



more economical to extract from a man of less 

 than De Morgan's ability'. He wrote one- 

 sixth of the Penny cyclopaedia, and he made 

 voluminous contributions to the Journal of 

 education, the British almanac and companion, 

 the Dublin review. Notes and queries, the 

 Athenaeum, the insurance journals, and to the 

 memoirs and obituary notices of the Astronomi- 

 cal society', in whose affairs he took an active 

 part for thirty years. His most important con- 

 tributions to science are his papers on the 

 Foundations of algebra and on the Syllogism, 

 his text-books on Formal logic and on the Cal- 

 culus, and his treatises in the Encyclopaedia 

 metropolitana on the Calculus of functions and 

 the Theory- of probabilities. 



Such an amonnt of labor left very little 

 time for pleasure or relaxation; and, in fact, 

 De Morgan writes near the end of his hfe, " I 

 have never been hard working, but I have 

 been very continuouslj' at work. I have never 

 sought relaxation. And whj-? Because it 

 would have killed me. Amusement is real 

 hard work to me." He had, however, an in- 

 teresting circle of friends, who came frequently 

 to his house, and in whose society he found 

 great pleasure. Libri (the author of the His- 

 tory of mathematics), Arthur Hugh Clough, 

 Miss Muloch, and Mrs. Follen the abolition- 

 ist, were among them. Throughout his life, 

 also, he was an inveterate reader of novels, 

 good and bad. Puzzles, and even puns, were 

 interesting to him. He made a collection of 

 over eight hundred anagrams on his own 

 name ; and his fondness for paradox was so 

 well known that the circle-squarers all sent 

 him their most curious investigations. He 

 was a thorough believer in the phenomena 

 called spiritual. After describing some strik- 

 ing occurrences in spirit-rapping, he writes, 

 " I was perfecth- satisfied that some thing, or 

 some bodj', or some spirit, was reading my 

 thoughts; " and in regard to mesmerism, " Of 

 the curative powers of this agent I have no 

 more doubt than one has of things which he 

 has constantly- seen for j-ears." His feelings 

 on the subject of slavery were verj' intense, 

 and he sat up the greater part of one night to 

 finish Uncle Tom's cabin. 



De Morgan presents another instance of the 

 fact that a man's views of women in general 

 are seldom dissociated from the result of his 

 observations upon the few women who stand 

 nearest to him. His clever wife had the effect 

 of dispelling the prejudices with which his 

 rather narrow-minded mother had inspired him. 

 She writes, "I must not conceal the fact, 

 that, in the eariier part of his life, he held man- 



