Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/138

 ished in Scotland. Herschel himself says, "In Scotland the torch of abstract science had never burnt so feebly nor decayed so far as in England; nor was a high priest of the sublimer muse ever wanting in those ancient shrines, where Gregory and Napier had paid homage to her power." At that time, a Scotsman named Ivory was almost the sole British mathematician who was in touch with the great mathematical progress being made on the Continent, especially in France. John Herschel possessed the great advantage of living in a home where the chief languages of the Continent were understood, and in which relations with abroad were still maintained.

At the age of 17 Herschel entered St. John's College, Cambridge. His principal undergraduate friends were Charles Babbage and George Peacock, and all three were impressed with the decline of mathematical science in England. Herschel thus describes the situation: "Students at our universities, fettered by no prejudices, entangled by no habits, and excited by the ardour and emulation of youth, had heard of the existence of masses of knowledge from which they were debarred by the mere accident of position. There required no more. No prestige which magnifies what is unknown, and the attraction inherent in what is forbidden, coincided in their impulse. The books were procured and read, and produced their natural effects. The brows of many a Cambridge moderator were elevated, half in ire, and half in admiration, at the unusual answers which began to appear in examination papers. Even moderators are not made of impenetrable stuff; their souls were touched, though fenced with sevenfold Jacquier, and tough bullhide of Vince and Wood. They were carried away with the stream, in short, or replaced by successors full of their newly-acquired powers. The modern analysis was adopted in its largest extent." The three undergraduates accomplished their object by forming an Analytical Society. The Society published a volume of memoirs but more important still they translated and published Lacroix's smaller Treatise on the Differential Calculus, to which Herschel added an appendix on Finite Differences.