CHARLES BABBAGE. 



[Compiled for the Smithsonian Institution.] 



Charles Babbage, upon being urged to write his own biography, re- 

 plied that he had no desire to do it while he had strength and means to 

 do better work. Some men, he said, write their lives to save them- 

 selves from ennuij careless of the amount they inflict on their readers ; 

 others, lest some kind surviving friend in showing off his own talent in 

 writing personal history might show up theirs 5 and others still from 

 fear that the vampires of literature might make them a prey. He be- 

 longed to no one of these classes. What a man had done for others, not 

 what he might say about himself, formed his best life. And so to many 

 who asked him to prepare an autobiography he sent a list of his works, 

 " which," he naively adds, " no one cared to insert." Still, few persons 

 who have made a name while living are insensible to posthumous fame, 

 and Babbage was among the number. While professing to treat these 

 applications lightly, he nevertheless set about placing on record an ac- 

 count of himself, and though he rejects the name of autobiography, he 

 has left behind him, in a work which he entitles " Passages from the 

 Life of a Philosopher," a memoir which in variety of detail and clear- 

 ness of description, liveliness of style and sententious remark, is almost 

 without its parallel. Without being confined to this witty and erratic 

 narrative, and putting the estimate of the thinking men of the age 

 rather than his own upon what he was and what he did, this notice 

 will aim to do justice to certainly not the least remarkable man of this 

 nineteenth century. 



Of the mere personal history of this eminent philosopher and sci- 

 entific mechanist little need be recorded. He was born of gentle blood 

 and moderate competence on December 26, 1792. From earliest years 

 he showed great desire to inquire into the causes of things that 

 astonish childish minds. He eviscerated toys to ascertain their man- 

 ner of working ; he sought to prove the reality of the devil by draw- 

 ing with his blood a circle on the floor and repeating the Lord's 

 prayer backward ; he dissipated toothaches by reading Don Quixote ; 

 he bargained with another boy that whoever died first should appear 

 to the survivor, and spent a night of sleeplessness when the first event 

 of the compact occurred, awaiting in vain his comrade's appearance. 

 In college he was perpetually puzzling his tutors by abstruse questions. 

 When the circulation of the Bible with or without comment became a 

 fierce controversy at Cambridge, he formed, with Herschel, Maule, 



