Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 4.djvu/120

Rh removed from school at the age of ten years to assist his father in his trade as a cooper, and was indebted for all his subsequent acqui- sitions, including the Latin and some modern languages and a pro- found knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, entirely to his own exertions unaided by any instruction whatever. He became after- wards a clerk to a ship-chandler, where his taste for astronomy first showed itself, and was sufficiently advanced to enable him to master the rules for the calculation of a lunar eclipse ; and his subsequent occupation as supercargo in a merchant vessel sailing from Salem to the East Indies, led naturally to the further developement of his early tastes, by the active and assiduous study of those depart- ments of that great and comprehensive science which are most im- mediately subservient to the purposes of navigation. It was owing to the reputation which he had thus acquired for his great knowledge of nautical astronomy, that he was employed by the booksellers to revise several successive editions of Hamilton Moore's Practical Navigator, which he afterwards replaced by an original work on the same subject, remarkable for the clearness and conciseness of its rules, for its numerous and comprehensive tables, the greatest part of which he had himself recalculated and reframed, and for its perfectly practical character as a manual of navigation ; this work, which has been republished in this country, has been for many years almost exclusively used in the United States of America.

Dr. Bowditch having been early elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at Boston, commenced the publica- tion of a series of communications in the Memoirs of that Society, which speedily established his reputation as one of the first astro- nomers and mathematicians of America, and attracted likewise the favourable notice of men of science in Europe.

During the last twenty years of his life. Dr. Bowditch was em- ployed as the acting president of an Insurance Company at Salem, and latterly also as actuary of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company at Boston : the income which he derived from these employments, and from the savings of former years, enabled him to abandon all other and more absorbing engagements, and to devote his leisure hours entirely to scientific pursuits. In 1815 he began his great work, the translation of the Mecanique Celeste of Laplace, the fourth and last volume of which was not quite completed at the time of his death. The American Academy over which he presided for many years, at a very early period of the progress of this very extensive and costly undertaking, very liberally offered to defray the expense of printing it ; but he preferred to publish it from his own very limited means, and to dedicate it as a splendid and durable monument of his own labours and of the state of science in his country. He died in March last, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, after a life of singular usefulness and most laborious exertion, in the full enjoyment of every honour which his grateful countrymen in every part of America could pay to so distinguished a fellow-citizen.

Dr. Bowditch's translation of the great work of Laplace is a production of much labour and of no ordinary merit : every person who