There is no position in society more enviable than that of the few who unite a moderate independence with high intellectual qualities. Liberated from the necessity of seeking their support by a profession, they are unfettered by its restraints, and are enabled to direct the powers of their minds, and to concentrate their intellectual energies on those objects exclusively to which they feel that their powers may be applied with the greatest advantage to the community, and with the most lasting reputation to themselves. On the other hand, their middle station and limited income rescue them from those allurements to frivolity and dissipation, to which rank and wealth ever expose their possessors. Placed in such favourable circumstances, Mr. Babbage selected science as the field of his ambition; and his mathematical researches have conferred on him a high reputation, wherever the exact sciences are studied and appreciated. The suffrages of the mathematical world have been ratified in his own country, where he has been elected to the Lucasian Professorship in his own University—a chair, which, though of inconsiderable emolument, is one on which Newton has conferred everlasting celebrity. But it has been the fortune of this mathematician to surround himself with fame of another and more popular kind, and which rarely falls to the lot of those who devote their lives to the cultivation of the abstract sciences. This distinction he owes to the announcement, some years since, of his celebrated project of a Calculating Engine.