Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/78

 about?" to which he replied "I am thinking that all these mathematical tables might be calculated by machinery."

In the last year of his undergraduate career, he migrated from Trinity College to Peterhouse, and did not compete for honors, believing Herschel sure of the first place, and not caring to come out second. He took merely a pass degree in 1815, and thereafter resided in London, where philosophical breakfasts continued to be a feature of his house. In the year following the text-book of Lacroix Differential and Integral Calculus, translated by Herschel, Peacock, and Babbage, was published by the Analytical Society; and four years later a volume of Examples on the Calculus. Lacroix had also written on the calculus of Finite Differences, and both Herschel and Babbage were attracted to the subject. The latter immediately contributed three papers on "The Calculus of Functions" to the Royal Society and he was elected a Fellow at the age of twenty-five.

He married, and made a tour of the Continent. He visited Paris and studied the details of the arrangement by which the celebrated French tables had been computed under the direction of Prony; and he copied the logarithms to fourteen places of figures of every 500th number from 10,000 to 100,000 from the manuscript tables deposited in the observatory at Paris. These tables were computed at the time of the Revolution, in order to facilitate the application of the decimal division of the degree which had been adopted. In executing the task Prony received a valuable hint from Smith's Wealth of Nations where the "division of labor" is exemplified. He adopted the idea; appointed three classes of mathematical workers; first, five or six analyists to investigate the best formulæ; second, seven or eight mathematicians to calculate arithmetical values at suitable intervals; and third, sixty or eighty arithmeticians (said to have been tailors on a strike) to compute intermediate values by the method of differences. The tables thus computed fill seventeen large folio volumes.

On his return to London he was encouraged by Wollaston (a pioneer in electrical science) to set about the realization