A Budget of Paradoxes Volume I Part 50

Sir James Clark Ross (1800-1862) was a rear admiral in the British navy and an arctic and antarctic explorer of prominence. De Morgan's reference is to Ross's discovery of the magnetic pole on June 1, 1831. In 1838 he was employed by the Admiralty on a magnetic survey of the United Kingdom. He was awarded the gold medal of the geographical societies of London and Paris in 1842.

[659] John Partridge (1644-1715), the well-known astrologer and almanac maker. Although bound to a shoemaker in his early boyhood, he had acquired enough Latin at the age of eighteen to read the works of the astrologers.

He then mastered Greek and Hebrew and studied medicine. In 1680 he began the publication of his almanac, the _Merlinus Liberatus_, a book that acquired literary celebrity largely through the witty comments upon it by such writers as Swift and Steele.

[660] See note 642 on page 296.

[661] William Woodley also published several almanacs (1838, 1839, 1840) after his rejection by the Astronomical Society in 1834.

[662] It appeared at London.

[663] The first edition appeared in 1830, also at London.

[664] See note 441, page 196.

[665] Thomas Kerigan wrote _The Young Navigator's Guide to the siderial and planetary parts of Nautical Astronomy_ (London, 1821, second edition 1828), a work on eclipses (London, 1844), and the work on tides (London, 1847) to which De Morgan refers.

[666] Jean Sylvain Bailly, who was guillotined. See note 365, page 166.

[667] See note 670, page 309.

[668] Laurent seems to have had faint glimpses of the modern theory of matter. He is, however, unknown.

[669] See note 133, page 87.

[670] Francis Baily (1774-1844) was a London stockbroker. His interest in science in general and in astronomy in particular led to his membership in the Royal Society and to his presidency of the Astronomical Society. He wrote on interest and annuities (1808), but his chief works were on astronomy.

[671] If the story is correctly told Baily must have enjoyed his statement that Gauss was "the oldest mathematician now living." As a matter of fact he was then only 58, three years the junior of Baily himself. Gauss was born in 1777 and died in 1855, and Baily was quite right in saying that he was "generally thought to be the greatest" mathematician then living.

[672] Margaret Cooke, who married Flamsteed in 1692.

[673] John Brinkley (1763-1835), senior wrangler, first Smith's prize-man (1788), Andrews professor of astronomy at Dublin, first Astronomer Royal for Ireland (1792), F.R.S. (1803), Copley medallist, president of the Royal Society and Bishop of Cloyne. His _Elements of Astronomy_ appeared in 1808.

[674] See note 248, page 124.

[675] See note 276, page 133.

[676] See note 352, page 161.

[677] "It becomes the doctors of the Sorbonne to dispute, the Pope to decree, and the mathematician to go to Paradise on a perpendicular line."

[678] See note 124, page 83.

[679] See note 621, page 288.

[680] Sylvain van de Weyer, who was born at Louvain in 1802. He was a jurist and statesman, holding the portfolio for foreign affairs (1831-1833), and being at one time amba.s.sador to England.

[681] Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), correspondent of the _Times_ at Altona and in the Peninsula, and later foreign editor. He was one of the founders of the Athenaeum Club and of University College, London. He seems to have known pretty much every one of his day, and his posthumous _Diary_ attracted attention when it appeared.

[682] Was this Whewell, who was at Trinity from 1812 to 1816 and became a fellow in 1817?

[683] Tom Cribb (1781-1848) the champion pugilist. He had worked as a coal porter and hence received his nickname, the Black Diamond.

[684] John Finleyson, or Finlayson, was born in Scotland in 1770 and died in London in 1854. He published a number of pamphlets that made a pretense to being scientific. Among his striking phrases and sentences are the statements that the stars were made "to amuse us in observing them"; that the earth is "not shaped like a garden turnip as the Newtonians make it,"

and that the stars are "oval-shaped immense ma.s.ses of frozen water." The first edition of the work here mentioned appeared at London in 1830.

[685] Richard Brothers (1757-1824) was a native of Newfoundland. He went to London when he was about 30, and a little later set forth his claim to being a descendant of David, prince of the Hebrews, and ruler of the world.

He was confined as a criminal lunatic in 1795 but was released in 1806.

[686] Charles Grey (1764-1845), second Earl Grey, Viscount Howick, was then Prime Minister. The Reform Bill was introduced and defeated in 1831. The following year, with the Royal guarantees to allow him to create peers, he finally carried the bill in spite of "the number of the beast."

[687] The letters of obscure men, the _Epistolae obscurorum virorum ad venerabilem virum Magistrum Ortuinum Gratium Dauentriensem_, by Joannes Crotus, Ulrich von Hutten, and others appeared at Venice about 1516.

[688] The lamentations of obscure men, the _Lamentationes obscurorum virorum, non prohibete per sedem Apostolicam. Epistola D. Erasmi Roterodami: quid de obscuris sentiat_, by G. Ortwinus, appeared at Cologne in 1518.

[689] The criticism was timely when De Morgan wrote it. At present it would have but little force with respect to the better cla.s.s of algebras.

[690] Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster (1789-1860) was more of a man than one would infer from this satire upon his theory. He was a naturalist, astronomer, and physiologist. In 1812 he published his _Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena_, and seven years later (July 3, 1819) he discovered a comet. With Sir Richard Phillips he founded a Meteorological Society, but it was short lived. He declined a fellowship in the Royal Society because he disapproved of certain of its rules, so that he had a recognized standing in his day. The work mentioned by De Morgan is the second edition, the first having appeared at Frankfort on the Main in 1835 under the t.i.tle, _Recueil des ouvrages et des pensees d'un physicien et metaphysicien_.

[691] Zadkiel, whose real name was Richard James Morrison (1795-1874), was in his early years an officer in the navy. In 1831 he began the publication of the _Herald of Astrology_, which was continued as _Zadkiel's Almanac_.

His name became familiar throughout Great Britain as a result.

[692] See note 566, page 246.

[693] Sumner (1780-1862) was an Eton boy. He went to King's College, Cambridge, and was elected fellow in 1801. He took many honors, and in 1807 became M.A. He was successively Canon of Durham (1820), Bishop of Chester (1828), and Archbishop of Canterbury (1848). Although he voted for the Catholic Relief Bill (1829) and the Reform Bill (1832), he opposed the removal of Jewish disabilities.

[694] Charles Richard Sumner (1790-1874) was not only Bishop of Winchester (1827), but also Bishop of Llandaff and Dean of St. Paul's, London (1826).

He lost the king's favor by voting for the Catholic Relief Bill.

[695] John Bird Sumner, brother of Charles Richard.

[696] Thomas Musgrave (1788-1860) became Fellow of Trinity in 1812, and senior proctor in 1831. He was also Dean of Bristol.

[697] Charles Thomas Longley (1794-1868) was educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church, Oxford. He became M.A. in 1818 and D.D. in 1829.

Besides the bishoprics mentioned he was Bishop of Ripon (1836-1856), and before that was headmaster of Harrow (1829-1836).

[698] Thomson (1819-1890) was scholar and fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. He became chaplain to the Queen in 1859.

[699] This is worthy of the statistical psychologists of the present day.

[700] The famous Moon Hoax was written by Richard Adams Locke, who was born in New York in 1800 and died in Staten Island in 1871. He was at one time editor of the _Sun_, and the Hoax appeared in that journal in 1835. It was reprinted in London (1836) and Germany, and was accepted seriously by most readers. It was published in book form in New York in 1852 under the t.i.tle _The Moon Hoax_. Locke also wrote another hoax, the _Lost Ma.n.u.script of Mungo Park_, but it attracted relatively little attention.

[701] It is true that Jean-Nicolas Nicollet (1756-1843) was at that time in the United States, but there does not seem to be any very tangible evidence to connect him with the story. He was secretary and librarian of the Paris observatory (1817), member of the Bureau of Longitudes (1822), and teacher of mathematics in the Lycee Louis-le-Grand. Having lost his money through speculations he left France for the United States in 1831 and became connected with the government survey of the Mississippi Valley.

[702] This was Alexis Bouvard (1767-1843), who made most of the computations for Laplace's _Mecanique celeste_ (1793). He discovered eight new comets and calculated their orbits. In his tables of Ura.n.u.s (1821) he attributed certain perturbations to the presence of an undiscovered planet, but unlike Leverrier and Adams he did not follow up this clue and thus discover Neptune.

[703] Patrick Murphy (1782-1847) awoke to find himself famous because of his natural guess that there would be very cold weather on January 20, although that is generally the season of lowest temperature. It turned out that his forecasts were partly right on 168 days and very wrong on 197 days.

[704] He seems to have written nothing else. If one wishes to enter into the subject of the mathematics of the Great Pyramid there is an extensive literature awaiting him. Richard William Howard Vyse (1784-1853) published in 1840 his _Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837_, and in this he made a beginning of a scientific metrical study of the subject.