Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/162

146 through which I arrived at it was the most entangled and perplexed which probably ever occupied the human mind. Through the aid of the Mechanical Notation I examined numberless plans and systems of computings and I am sure, from the nature of its self-necessary verifications that it is impossible I can have been deceived.

On the 16th November, 1826, that very Council of the Royal Society which had made the law took the earliest opportunity to violate it by awarding the two Royal Medals, the first to Dalton, whose great discovery had been made nearly twenty years before, and the other to Ivory, for a paper published in their "Transactions" three years before. The history of their proceedings will be found in the "Decline of Science in England," p. 115, 1830.