XVlll 
George Bent ham, F.R.S. 
first systematically applied in such wise that Professor Stanley 
Jevons declared it to be £ undoubtedly the most fruitful 
discovery made in abstract logical science since the time 
of Aristotle.’ Meanwhile Bentham had been called to the 
Bar by Lincoln’s Inn, but his career as a barrister was the 
briefest. As counsel in a case he broke down in court 
through nervousness, and thenceforth wisely abandoned the 
practice of the profession. 
In botany Bentham was more at home than in the Law- 
courts. In 1828 his herbarium arrived from France, and in 
the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean 
Memorial by Professor Gray : ‘ Before sixty copies of the work had been sold, the 
publishers became bankrupt, and the whole impression of this work of a young and 
unknown author was sold for waste paper. One of the extant copies, however, 
came into the hands of the distinguished philosopher, Sir W. Hamilton, to whom 
the discovery of the quantification of the predicate was credited, and who, in claim- 
ing it, brought an acrimonious charge of plagiarism against Professor De Morgan 
upon this subject : yet this very book of Mr. Bentham’s is one of the ten placed by 
the title at the head of Sir William Hamilton’s article on Logic in the Edinburgh 
Review for April, 1833, and is once or twice referred to in that article ; and a dozen 
years later, in the course of the controversy with De Morgan, Sir William alluded 
to the article, as containing the germs of his discovery. We may imagine the 
avidity with which De Morgan, injuriously attacked, would have seized upon 
Mr. Bentham’s book if he had known of it. It is not so easy to understand how 
Mr. Bentham, although then absorbed in botanical researches, could have over- 
looked the controversy in the Athenaeum, or how, if he knew of it, he could have 
kept silence. It was only at the close of 1850 that Mr. Warlow sent from the 
coast of Wales a letter to the Athenaeum, in which he refers to Bentham’s book as 
one that had long before anticipated this interesting discovery. Although Hamilton 
himself never offered an explanation of his now unpleasant position (for the note 
obliquely referring to the matter in the second edition of his Discussions is not 
an explanation), Mr. Bain did (in the Athenaeum for Feb. 1, 1851); he immediately 
endeavoured to discredit the importance of Bentham’s work, and again in 1873 
(Contemporary Review, Vol. xxi) in reply to Herbert Spencer’s reclamation of 
Bentham’s discovery. To this Stanley Jevons made reply in the same volume 
(pp. 821-824) ; and later in his Principles of Science (ii. p. 387) this competent 
and impartial judge, in speaking of the connexion of Bentham’s work “ with the 
great discovery of the Quantification of the Predicate ” adds, “ I must continue to 
hold that the principle of quantification is explicitly stated by Mr. Bentham ; and 
it must be regarded as a remarkable fact in the history of logic, that Hamilton, 
while vindicating in 1847 his own claims to originality and priority as against the 
scheme of De Morgan, should have overlooked the much earlier and more closely 
related discoveries of Bentham. It must be that Hamilton reviewed Bentham’s 
book without reading it through, or that its ideas did not at the time leave any 
conscious impression upon the reviewer’s mind, yet may have fructified afterwards.” ’ 
