liii 



in the moderD analytical processes, was severely felt. Accordingly we 

 find him in the period of his tutorship, from its very commencement, 

 engaged in the production of a number of elementary treatises devoted 

 to this object, and to conveying the primary principles of mechanical 

 philosophy in a sound and logical form, as well as to affording an insight 

 into the modern ways of handling them, such as his ' Elementary 

 Treatise on Mechanics ' (1819) ; his ' Treatise on Dynamics ' (1823) ; 

 his ' Introduction to Dynamics,' ' First Principles of Mechanics,' and 

 * Treatise on the free motion of a Point and on Universal G-ravitation " 

 (1832) ; his ' Elementary Treatise on Mechanics,' and ' Analytical 

 Statics ' (1833), and his ' Mechanical Euclid ' (1837). Of these works, 

 the first mentioned has been considered by one excellently qualified to 

 judge of its merits as " a work of great value, and very far in advance of 

 any then existing text-book, for the clearness and correctness of its 

 treatment of bodies in contact, and in the precision with which the 

 assumptions involved in the laws of motion and the composition of forces 

 are stated, and illustrated." At the end of the last named (the Me- 

 chanical Euclid) is attached a section " on the Logic of Induction," in 

 which the leading idea which forms the foundation of his great work on 

 the Philosophy of the Indiictive Sciences, published three years later, 

 viz. that Induction consists in superinducing upon an assemblage of 

 observed phenomena, a conception — the creation of the mind, which is 

 not in the phenomena, but which serves to bind them under a common 

 aspect, and so give them an ideal unity — is anticipatorily introduced. 



By these works, and by the influence "which, as moderator in the 

 years 1820, 1828, and 1829, he was enabled to exercise on the course of 

 the examinations for degrees, he contributed materially to that im- 

 provement he so much desired to see established in the mathematics of 

 the University. 



It would give but a very inadequate idea, however, of the extent of 

 his reading and of his extraordinary intellectual progress at this period 

 of his life, to measure them by these productions. A more wonderful 

 variety and amount of knowledge in almost every department of human 

 inquiry was perhaps never in the same interval of time accumulated by 

 any man ; embracing not only Mathematical and Physical Science in 

 all its forms, but extending over Classical and Continental literature, 

 Metaphysics and History, Ethics, Social and Political Economy, together 

 with Botany, Architecture, EDgineering, and a host of other subjects — and 

 that not by merely a general and superficial acquaintance, but one which 

 an exact and conscientious application such as most men devote to some 

 favourite branch of study, alone can give. Nothing short of such a store 

 of precise and varied information could have qualified him for the pro- 

 duction of those great works on the History and on the Philosophy of 

 the Inductive Sciences which have placed his name among the brightest 

 in the annals of our Philosophy, and the former of which appeared in 



