85 
Proceedings of the Royal Society. 
materials for inferring the amount of confidence to be placed in the 
researches which we have selected for honour. 
Mr Boole is one of those remarkable men who, under almost every 
possible disadvantage, rises from obscurity to high eminence. In 
early youth he held the situation of usher in a school in Yorkshire. 
After four or five years thus spent, he commenced business as a 
schoolmaster, on his own account, in the city of Lincoln, being even 
then under twenty. He was not unsuccessful. This is a remark- 
able fact, when we consider that he delighted in such reading as the 
“ Mecanique Celeste ,” and “ Liouvilles <5f Crellds Journals That 
such was his reading is abundantly proved by his earlier papers — the 
first of which appeared, so far as I know, in the “ Cambridge Ma- 
thematical Journal for 1840.” These papers attracted the attention 
of the editor of the Journal, Mr Gregory, and a correspondence had 
commenced between them, which the lamented death of the latter 
alone prevented being productive of much valuable fruit. My first 
knowledge of Mr Boole, except such as might be derived from the 
papers above referred to, commenced in 1844, about the beginning 
of which year he sent to the Boyal Society of London a Memoir 
“ On a General Method in Analysis.” Many problems of no very 
great apparent complication had baffled the ingenuity of mathema- 
ticians. Solutions were, it is true, obtained, but the processes were 
so indirect and unsatisfactory, that they were something like excres- 
cences on the smooth face of science. Of this class of problems is 
an equation which occurs in the theory of the figure of the earth. Mr 
Airy, in his “Tracts,” gives simply the result, without the slightest 
indication of a process. Mr Gaskin and Mr Leslie Ellis had at- 
tacked this individual problem with partial success. But Mr Boole’s 
“New Method” not only set the logical question of dealing with 
separation of symbols in a clear light, but completely effected the 
solution of all that class of problems, of which this was a particular 
example. The Boyal Society did me the honour to refer the paper 
to me, and I had the good fortune at once to perceive its importance, 
and to recommend the Society to bestow on it a mark of approbation. 
Accordingly, the Council of the Society awarded to Mr Boole the 
Boyal Medal for 1844, expressing their conviction that “ his Method 
would find a permanent place in the science.” 
After this he remained many years in comparative obscurity in Lin- 
coln, but at length received the appointment of Professor of Mathe- 
