CHARLES BABBAGE. 173 



his scbeme of symbols did not admit of a still more compact arrange- 

 ment, and whether eight revolutions were not needless waste of power. 

 The question was exceedingly abstruse. Finding every effort to keep 

 in mind the order and arrangement of wheels and pulleys, levers and 

 shafts, claws and bolts, so as to suggest auy improved arrangement, the 

 engineer completely broke down. Mr. Babbage, however, with scarcely 

 any mental exertion, and merely by sliding a bit of ruled pasteboard 

 up and down his plan in search of vacant places, contrived at length to 

 reduce the eight motions to six, to five, and to three. This application 

 of an almost metaphysical system of abstract signs, by which the mo- 

 tion of the hand alternately performs the office of the mind and practi- 

 cal mechanics, to the construction of a complicated engine, is regarded 

 by many eminent engineers as the most wonderful and useful discovery 

 the great inventor ever made. 



Although no one of the principal inventions of the philosophic mech- 

 anist has ever been completed, and though, his marvelously compre- 

 hensive thoughts of what machinery, working on the border land of 

 intellect, might be made to accomplish would seem to have passed from 

 the world without good, yet his work was not in vain. Hundreds of 

 mechanical appliances in the factories and workshops of Europe and 

 America, scores of ingenious expedients in mining and architecture, 

 the construction of bridges and boring of tunnels, and a world of tools 

 by which labor is benefited and the arts improved — all the overflowings 

 of a mind so rich that its very waste became valuable to utilize — came 

 from Charles Babbage. He more, perhaps, than any man who ever 

 lived, narrowed the chasm that from earliest ages has. separated science 

 and practical mechanics. 



This memoir has thus far treated its subject as a mathematician and 

 philosophical mechanist. He was both, in a degree that made his name 

 famous. But he was more than this. As a scientific man, keeping him- 

 self abreast with the progress of modern discovery 5 as a man of intel- 

 lect, accepting, analyzing, and suggesting thought that is emancipating 

 mind from old traditions ; and as a man of his time, the associate for 

 more than half a century of statesmen and poets, chemists, and geogra- 

 phers, engineers, and philologists, he is worthy of notice. Upon what- 

 ever he spoke or wrote he was always perspicuous. Language was to 

 him x)re-eminently the embodiment of ideas. Logical sequence was 

 the one essential element of his train of thinking. His estimate of men 

 was formed less from what they were than from what they did. He 

 was neither tuft-hunter nor cynic. Faults his character possessed, 

 grievous and ridiculous, perchance,' when viewed in certain lights, but 

 they were never inconsistent with his independent manliness, nor de- 

 rogatory to his elevated philosoi)hy. He knew his own worth 5 asserted 

 his rightful claims ; kex)t an unquailing aspect in his long single-hand 

 fight in behalf of his inventions with jiurblind rulers ; victorious never, 

 but never vanquished ; heroic in most that he said and all that he did J 



