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696 laborious. Hence, envious minds have not let the opportunity pass to reproach him with having made himself unintelligible in order to appear profound. The reason of this is, that Gauss does not leave visible any trace of the analytical course by which he has been led to the final solution. He used to say that when a monument is exhibited to the public there should remain no traces of the scaffoldings that have been used in constructing it. He was wrong in this; for, although it may be true that the scaffoldings ought to be withdrawn from the eye of the public, they should be for a certain time accessible to those of architects; and, even if they are out of use, they are sometimes the object of special descriptions, which make their merit understood. . . . Although Gauss is hard to understand as a writer, he was very clear as a professor. He was not, however, one of those mathematicians who are represented as being so deeply buried in their science as to have become strangers to the outer world. He used to talk pertinently and agreeably on subjects of philosophy, politics, and literature."

The charge of obscurity here brought against Gauss is reviewed by Prof. H. J. S. Smith, who says: "It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true, that it is precisely the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. The fact is, that there is neither obscurity nor difficulty in his writings, so long as we read them in the submissive spirit in which an intelligent school-boy is made to read his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the assertions succeed one another in a perfectly just analogical order; there is nothing, so far, of which we can complain. But, when we have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is but begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil, and is as yet concealed from us. . . . No vestige appears of the process by which the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demonstration."

According to M. Wagener, as summarized by Prof. Tucker, though Gauss looked upon mathematics as the principal means for developing human knowledge, he yet fully recognized the beneficial influence of an acquaintance with classical literature. He had, indeed, a wonderful faculty for the acquisition of languages; he was acquainted with most of the European languages, and could speak many of them well. At the age of sixty-two he took up the study of the Russian language, and he mastered it in two years. He took a great interest in politics till within a few weeks of his death. "His lectures, in which he adopted the