Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/239

Rh reasons when he was twenty-eight years old, he took up his residence in Paris and later became a French citizen. His remarkable ability won him in the brief space of three years the chair of mathematics in the College of Prance and admission to the Academy of Sciences as successor to the great French geometer, Legendre. His activity extended to the political field as inspector-general of public instructoninstruction [sic] and later as inspector-general of the libraries of France. Soon difficulties of another nature overtook him, as he was accused of appropriating books and manuscripts from French libraries to his own use, in spite of the fact that he had previously offered his valuable collection as a whole, consisting of some 30,000 books and 2,000 manuscripts to the Royal Library of Paris on the rejected condition that it be kept intact as the Libri Collection. His conviction of the misuse of the national libraries occurred, many say unjustly, in 1805 and he was again an exile, living in England as a fugitive from the law; we will not say justice. His library was sold at auction in England, many of the works finding their way into the hands of Prince Boncompagni and after the dispersal of his library into the Plimpton collection and the private library of David Eugene Smith.

Prince Baldassarre Boncompagni, who gathered together a second famous collection of mathematical books and manuscripts, came naturally by his interest in scientific work, as he belonged to that same princely family as Pope Gregory XIII., who revised the calendar. While eminent as a contributor to mathematical literature, Boncompagni' s greater service was as a patron of the science. At his own expense he published the "Bulletin of the Bibliography and History of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences," running through twenty volumes, with many valuable contributions by German, French and Italian scholars to the history of mathematics and astronomy. Even more important were his numerous publications in regard to Leonard of Pisa, who flourished at the beginning of the thirteenth century and to whom was due in a large measure the spread of the Arabic numerals in Italy and Europe. The publications of Boncompagni included two large volumes of the writings of Leonard of Pisa and two Latin versions of the Arabic work of Mohammed ben Musa, al-Khowarazmi, who made the Hindu art of reckoning known to the Arabs in the early ninth century; these Latin versions were made by a Spaniard and an Englishman, both of whom studied at that Moslem center of learning, Toledo, in the early twelfth century. Prince Boncompagni's magnificent collection was offered, on certain mild conditions, to the city of Rome, but was refused. While in printed works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this library was not as complete as is the Plimpton, yet the equal of this collection of old mathematical manuscripts will doubtless never again be held by any private library. The sale at auction of these books took place as recently as 1898.