96 



removed from school at the age of ten years to assist his father in 

 his trade as a cooper, and was indebted for all his subsequent acqui- 

 sitions, including the Latin and some modern languages and a pro- 

 found knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, entirely to his own 

 exertions unaided by any instruction whatever. He became after- 

 wards a clerk to a ship-chandler, where his taste for astronomy first 

 showed itself, and was sufficiently advanced to enable him to master 

 the rules for the calculation of a lunar eclipse ; and his subsequent 

 occupation as supercargo in a merchant vessel sailing from Salem 

 to the East Indies, led naturally to the further developement of 

 his early tastes, by the active and assiduous study of those depart- 

 ments of that great and comprehensive science which are most im- 

 mediately subservient to the purposes of navigation. It was owing 

 to the reputation which he had thus acquired for his great knowledge 

 of nautical astronomy, that he was employed by the booksellers to 

 revise several successive editions of Hamilton Moore's Practical 

 Navigator, which he afterwards replaced by an original work on 

 the same subject, remarkable for the clearness and conciseness of 

 its rules, for its numerous and comprehensive tables, the greatest 

 part of which he had himself recalculated and reframed, and for its 

 perfectly practical character as a manual of navigation ; this work, 

 which has been republished in this country, has been for many years 

 almost exclusively used in the United States of America. 



Dr. Bowditch having been early elected a Fellow of the American 

 Academy of Arts and Sciences at Boston, commenced the publica- 

 tion of a series of communications in the Memoirs of that Society, 

 which speedily established his reputation as one of the first astro- 

 nomers and mathematicians of America, and attracted likewise the 

 favourable notice of men of science in Europe. 



During the last twenty years of his life. Dr. Bowditch was em- 

 ployed as the acting president of an Insurance Company at Salem, and 

 latterly also as actuary of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance 

 Company at Boston : the income which he derived from these 

 employments, and from the savings of former years, enabled him to 

 abandon all other and more absorbing engagements, and to devote 

 his leisure hours entirely to scientific pursuits. In 1815 he began his 

 great work, the translation of the Mecanique Celeste of Laplace, the 

 fourth and last volume of which was not quite completed at the time of 

 his death. The American Academy over which he presided for many 

 years, at a very early period of the progress of this very extensive 

 and costly undertaking, very liberally offered to defray the expense of 

 printing it ; but he preferred to publish it from his own very limited 

 means, and to dedicate it as a splendid and durable monument of his 

 own labours and of the state of science in his country. He died in 

 March last, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, after a life of singular 

 usefulness and most laborious exertion, in the full enjoyment of 

 every honour which his grateful countrymen in every part of 

 America could pay to so distinguished a fellow-citizen. 



Dr. Bowditch's translation of the great work of Laplace is a pro- 

 duction of much labour and of no ordinary merit : every person who 



