Obituary — Mr. Charles Bahhage, F.R.S. 491 



Mr. Charles Babbage, F.E.S. — This eminent mathematician and 

 philosopher was born 26th December, 1792, and died at his resi- 

 dence, Dorset St., Marylebone, on the 20th inst., in his eightieth year. 

 He was the inventor and partial constructor of the famous calculat- 

 ing engine or machine, which the world has associated with his name, 

 and which is now preserved in the Museum of King's College, 

 London. As a writer in the Dictionary of Universal Biography remarks : 



" The possibility of constructing a piece of mechanism capable of 

 performing certain operations on numbers is by no means new ; it 

 was thought of by Pascal and geometers, and more recently it has 

 been reduced to practice by M. Thomas, of Colmar, in France, and 

 by the Messrs. Schifitz, of Sweden ; but never before or since has any 

 scheme so gigantic as that of Mr. Babbage been anywhere imagined." 



His achievements, says the Times, were two-fold ; he constructed 

 what he called a Difference Engine, and he planned and demon- 

 strated the practicability of an Analytical Engine also. 



It would be entirely beyond our province to refer here in any 

 detail to Mr. Babbage's labours and sacrifices ; his history is that of 

 almost all original inventors ; his machine, the labour of his life, 

 over which he expended his time, his brains, and his fortune, was 

 never completed, and will remain unfinished, until perchance some 

 adapter of other men's ideas shall be able to effect its completion by 

 some more economic method than was known to him. 



Geologists are indebted to Mr. Babbage for a most valuable and 

 philosophical paper on the rate of G-eological changes, and the move- 

 ments of elevation and subsidence of land as illustrated by the Temple 

 of Serapis, at Puzzuoli, in the Bay of Baise, near Naples (see Quart. 

 Journ. Geol. Soc, 1847, vol. iii). This celebrated monument of 

 antiquity affords in itself unequivocal evidence that the relative level 

 of land and sea has changed twice at Puzzuoli since the Christian 

 era ; and each movement of elevation and subsidence has exceeded 

 20 feet. Mr. Babbage examined the temple and inland cliff (covered 

 with Balani and full of the perforations of Lithodomous Mollusca) in 

 company with Sir Edmund Head, in June, 1828 ; and a full account 

 will be foiind of his researches both in his original paper and also in 

 Sir Charles LyeU's " Principles" (vol. ii. pp. 164-179, 10th edition, 

 1868). It may seem strange at the present day that the idea of the per- 

 manence of the ocean's level should have been denied by many other- 

 wise able writers, but the phenomena of the Bay of Baiae have given 

 rise to interminable controversies, all arising (says Sir Charles Lyell) 

 from an extreme reluctance to admit that the land, rather than the 

 sea, is subject alternately to rise and fall (Principles, op. cit. p. 179). 



A list of eighty papers and works by Mr. Babbage is recorded ; 

 the most valuable no doubt of all are his " Tables of Logarithms," 

 from 1 to 108,000, a work which, although now forty years old, is 

 still held in high esteem by all upon whom the laborious calculations 

 of astronomy and mathematical science devolve. Mr, Babbage was 

 one of the oldest members of the Royal Society, and more than fifty 

 years ago was one of the founders of the Astronomical Society ; he 

 and Sir John Herschel were the last survivors of that body. 



