LITMIR.BIZ

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It was while holding this Professorship, namely, at the general election of November, 1832 – which followed on the passing of the first Reform Bill – that he was put forward as a candidate for the representation of the newly-formed borough of Finsbury, standing in the advanced Liberal interest, as a supporter not only of parliamentary, financial, and fiscal reform, but also of ‘the Ballot, triennial Parliaments, and the abolition of all sinecure posts and offices.’ But the electors did not care to choose a philosopher; so he was unsuccessful, and we believe never again wooed the suffrages of either that or any other constituency.

      We have mentioned the fact that Mr. Babbage was the author of published works to the extent of some 80 volumes. A full list of these, however, would not interest or edify the general reader, and those who wish to study their names can see them recorded at full length in the new library catalogue of the British Museum. Further information respecting them will be found in the 12th chapter of Mr. Weld’s History of the Royal Society, which we have already quoted. One or two of them, however, we should specify. The best known of them all, perhaps is his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, a work designed by him at once to refute the opinion supposed to be implied and encouraged in the first volume of that learned series, that an ardent devotion to mathematical studies is unfavourable to a real religious faith, and also to give specimens of the defensive aid which the evidences of Christianity may receive from the science of numbers, if studied in a proper spirit.

      Another of his works which has found a celebrity of its own is a volume called The Decline of Science, both the title and the contents of which give reason to believe that its author looked somewhat despondingly on the scientific attainments of the present age. The same opinion was still further worked out by Mr. Babbage in a book on the first Great Exhibition, which he published just 20 years ago. Another of his works which deserve mention here is one on The Economy of Manufactures, which was one result of a tour of inspection which he made through England and upon the Continent in search of mechanical principles for the formation of Logarithmic Tables.

      It is about 40 years since Mr. Babbage produced his Tables of Logarithms from 1 to 108,000, a work upon which he bestowed a vast amount of labour, and in the publication of which he paid great attention to the convenience of calculators, whose eyes, he well knew, must dwell for many hours at a time upon their pages. He was rewarded by the full appreciation of his work by the computers not only of his own, but of foreign countries; for in several of those countries editions from the stereotyped plates of the tables were published, with translations of the preface. Notwithstanding the numerous logarithmic tables which have since appeared, those of Mr. Babbage are still held in high esteem by all upon whom the laborious calculations of astronomy and mathematical science devolve.

      Mr. Babbage was one of the oldest members of the Royal Society at the time of his death; he was also more than fifty years ago one of the founders of the Astronomical Society, and he and Sir John Herschel were the last survivors of that body. He was also an active and zealous member of many of the leading learned societies of London and Edinburgh, and in former years at least an extensive contributor to their published Transactions. His last important publication was the amusing and only too characteristic autobiographical work to which we have already referred as Passages in the Life of a Philosopher.

      Shortly after this obituary appeared on 23 October 1871 Babbage’s nephew wrote to The Times to point out that the mathematician had been born in 1791 not 1792. His father, a banker who owned an estate at Bitton in south Devon, was at his death resident at 44 Crosby Row in the Walworth Road in south London. Babbage had been baptised at St Mary’s, Walworth, on 6 January 1792. He was educated at a succession of schools in Devon and London, matriculating at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1810 and transfering to Peterhouse in 1814. Without taking any examinations, he was granted an honorary MA in 1814. In his lifetime Babbage’s vastly innovative calculating machines seem to have been considered enigmatic. His first Difference Engine weighed an ungainly 15 tonnes. His second was not fully constructed until 1989-1991 when the Science Museum proved the accuracy of its calculations. Had it been realised in the nineteenth century his Analytical Engine, using punch cards, would have been the first programmable computer. Babbage was instrumental in establishing the standard gauge used on British railways and is credited with the invention of the ‘pilot’ or cow-catcher affixed to railway locomotives. A crater on the moon was named after him.

       EMPEROR NAPOLEON III

       Emperor of the French: ‘History will find much to reproach him with, but it is certain his contemporaries have been very unjust to him.’

      9 JANUARY 1873

      IT IS WITH regret we announce the death of the Emperor Napoleon yesterday. Although the fate of the illustrious patient’s general health and the critical nature of the operation performed on him naturally excited uneasiness as to the ultimate result, yet there was little apprehension of immediate danger. Indeed he had slept so soundly through the night and awakened comparatively so strong in the early morning that it had been decided to undertake a further operation at noon. He sank, however, suddenly, and in a very short time all was over.

      In the singular career of the late Emperor, as in that of most remarkable men, there are breaks which divide it into distinct periods, without injuring the general dramatic unity. He was born seemingly to greatness. Apparently it threatened to elude him. He struggled after it in the face of adverse circumstances from the time he attained to years of discretion. He partly achieved it, partly had it thrust upon him, and after a success which should have satisfied his wildest dreams, he ended his active life an exile, as he had begun it. It would not be enough to say that Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was born in the purple. His cradle was at the Tuileries Palace, in the closest vicinity to the Throne. He was the youngest son of Louis, King of Holland, and of Hortense Beauharnais, the Empress Josephine’s daughter. His father was Napoleon’s third brother; but the descendants of Joseph were excluded from the succession by their sex, and those of Lucien by the disfavour under which that stern Republican had fallen; so that, at the date of Louis Napoleon’s birth, the 20th of April, 1808, the heir-apparent was sought among the scions of the younger branch. Whether, in the event of the Emperor’s dying without a son, preference would have been given to Louis Napoleon over his elder brother Napoleon Louis, and what reasons might have determined such a choice, it would now be useless to inquire. Suffice it to know that the Emperor evinced a strong predilection in favour of this younger son of his step-daughter, Hortense. ‘His name,’ we are told, ‘was written down at the head of the family register of the Napoleon dynasty.’ His baptism was put off for more than two years and a half, till the 10th of November, 1810, when the Emperor and his newly-married Empress, Maria Louisa, soon to be a mother, held him at the font; and although the birth of the King of Rome, five months later, disappointed the hopes of his immediate succession, the infant of Hortense still held for several years a most important position in his uncle’s household, and was treated with all the honours due to an heir presumptive. He was seven years old when he stood by his uncle’s side at the great gathering on the Champ de Mai during the Hundred Days, and, after Waterloo, he clung to his uncle’s knees when the Emperor left La Malmaison, struggling against separation, as if instinct had told him that with the Emperor his own fortunes and those of the House were overshadowed.

      The young Prince, reduced, with his mother, to a private station, spent eight years then at the Augsburg Gymnasium; then six more as a student under domestic tutors at the Castle of Arenenberg, in the canton of Thurgau, on the Lake of Constance, became proficient in history and mathematics, skilful in fencing, horse-manship, and swimming, and curious about military affairs; joining the ranks of the Swiss Militia, and making the acquaintance of the Federal General Dufour. Next to the pale reminiscences of Court pageantries in his early childhood, nothing, perhaps, so powerfully contributed to form the character of the future Emperor as the influence of the mother in whose house he grew up as an only child. The marriage of Hortense with Louis Bonaparte was, by his confession, ‘forced and ill-assorted.’ Seven months before the birth of their third son the Royal couple parted never to be re-united. It was not without contention that the ex-King of Holland, now Duke of Saint Leu,

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