Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/125

 1840-50] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 103 books were transferred, and the instruments, pictures, and curio- sities divided by lot. Some of the most interesting were afterwards presented to our Society, Lee making a gift of the portrait of John Middleton, referred to above, and Mr. William Wilson, the senior member of the old Society, presenting an album of 25 portraits, including 13 out of 23 known prints of Newton. Its Library. The history of the Mathematical Society, so far as we can glean it, is certainly a very curious episode in British science. In scientific value it is unfortunately nil, apart from the collection of a library, but it illustrates a national capacity and inclination, which our own Society and a host of others also exemplify, for forming circles with disinterested aims and keeping them in permanent being. The library consisted of upwards of 2500 volumes. The collected catalogue of them is not now avail- able. When they were incorporated with our books, many volumes were described as of an unusual, some of a rare, character ; mostly mathematics and chemistry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of the lists of purchases, and a few dozen of the volumes, handled at random, reveal, for example, Clairaut, Figure de la Terre ; Commercium Epistolicum ; Euler, Theoria Motus Lunce ; Boscovich, Opuscula ; Taylor, Sexagesimal Table ; Burck- hardt's Tables ; Delambre's Tables ; Flamsteed, Historia Ccelestis and Atlas ; Histoire de V Academic des Sciences, 113 vols., i2mo ; Euclidis Elementorum Libri XV Greece et Latine, Paris, 1573, " Liber rarissimus " ; Bernoulli, Doctrine of Permutations,. . . edited by Francis Maseres, and presented by him, 1795 : Euler, Institutiones Calculi Integralis ; Arbogast, Calcul des Derivations ; Robert Boyle, Tracts, 1672 ; d'Alembert and Condorcet, Nouvelles Experiences sur la Resistance des Fluides, 1777 ; Desaguliers, Course of Experimental Philosophy, 1763. There are besides the current English mathematical textbooks of the period, Wood, Bonnycastle, etc. ; Newton's commentators and diluters figure pretty strongly. From these specimens it may be accepted that, what with purchases and what with gifts, the library was a fairly enterprising collection for its period. The pathetic thing is, that with all its long life and good inten- tions the old Mathematical Society never became a place where men really cultivated mathematics. We live in a country where a George Green, a Dalton, a Faraday, though rare, of course, are rather characteristic than singular. On a lower scale one Fellow, Professor Wallace, of Edinburgh, who died in this period, was a bookbinder's apprentice, who began his own education on the books of science which passed through his hands. The mathe- matics he wrote, about 1800, though no great affair, are quite in line with the developments of analysis which Euler had taught.