543 
of Edinburgh, Session 1871 - 72 . 
lie did; they will recognise the impetus his researches have given 
to geology all over the world; and let us hope also they will see 
in the Chair he has founded the starting-point of a new and active 
school of Scottish geology,” 
I have left to the last in this biographical sketch of our lately 
deceased Fellows two of the most eminent men of British science 
in their day —Herschel and Babbage. For as I could not pretend 
to do justice to the lives of men whose pursuits, in the highest 
range of physical science, were so far removed from my own, I 
think it right to keep quite apart the following eulogium, the 
preparation of which my university colleague, Professor Tait, has 
kindly allowed me to impose on him, and which I will give in his 
own words:— 
“Of Sir John F. W. Herschel and Charles Babbage, who may 
be fitly mentioned together, it is not necessary that much should 
be said, as their contributions to science cannot fail to be set forth 
at length in the Proceedings of other Societies, with which they 
were more connected than with our own. Intimate friends during 
their undergraduate career at Cambridge, they joined us as ordi¬ 
nary Fellows shortly after taking their degrees, and when they 
were just commencing, along with the late Dean Peacock, what 
all must consider, in spite of their other grand contributions to 
science, the greatest work of their lives—the restoration of mathe¬ 
matical science in Britain. It is impossible even now to over¬ 
estimate the value of this service. Few know to what a state of 
ignorance we had fallen at the time when Lagrange, Laplace, 
Fourier, Cauchy, Poisson, and G-auss, and many others abroad, 
were advancing with breathless rapidity in the track, neglected by 
us, of James Bernoulli and Euler. Partly from a mistaken notion 
that they were honouring Newton by adhering to his published 
methods, partly owing to the British dislike to men and things 
foreign, which at this time was pushed, perhaps not unnaturally, 
to extreme lengths in all matters, and partly in consequence of our 
long state of war with France, our mathematicians had never even 
learned those unpublished methods by which Newton made his 
discoveries, which, as soon as they 'were to some extent divined 
