It is impossible to follow with intelligent interest the course of astronomical discovery without feeling some curiosity as to the means by which such surprising results have been secured. Indeed, the bare acquaintance with what has been achieved, without any corresponding knowledge of how it has been achieved, supplies food for barren wonder rather than for fruitful and profitable thought. Ideas advance most readily along the solid ground of practical reality, and often find true sublimity while laying aside empty marvels. Progress is the result, not so much of sudden flights of genius, as of sustained, patient, often commonplace endeavour; and the true lesson of scientific history lies in the close connection which it discloses between the most brilliant developments of knowledge and the faithful accomplishment of his daily task by each individual thinker and worker.

It would be easy to fill a volume with the detailed account of the long succession of optical and mechanical improvements by means of which the observation of the heavens has been brought to its present degree of perfection; but we must here content ourselves with a summary sketch of the chief amongst them. The first place in our consideration is naturally claimed by the telescope.

This marvellous instrument, we need hardly remind our readers, is of two distinct kinds–that in which light is gathered together into a focus by refraction, and that in which the same end is attained by reflection.

The new way struck out by Janssen and Lockyer was at once and eagerly followed. In every part of Europe, as well as in North America, observers devoted themselves to the daily study of the chromosphere and prominences. Foremost among these were Lockyer in England, Zöllner at Leipzig, Spörer at Anclam, Young at Hanover, New Hampshire, Secchi and Respighi at Rome. There were many others, but these names are conspicuous from the outset.

The first point to be cleared up was that of chemical composition. Leisurely measurements verified the presence above the sun's surface of hydrogen in prodigious masses, but showed that sodium had nothing to do with the orange-yellow ray identified with it in the haste of the eclipse. From its vicinity to the D pair (than which it is slightly more refrangible), the prominence-line was, however, designated D3, and the unknown substance emitting it was named by Frankland “helium.” Young is inclined to associate with it two other faint but persistent lines in the spectrum of the chromosphere; and Messrs. Liveing and Dewar pointed out, in 1879, that the wave-lengths of all three are bound together with that of the coronal ray “1474” by numerical ratios virtually the same with those underlying the vibrations of hydrogen, and also conformed to by certain lines of lithium and magnesium. This obscure but interesting subject deserves further inquiry.

To Sir John Herschel.

91 Adelaide Road, March 25, 1867.

1867

My dear Sir John,—‘How do you bear this trying weather?’ asked a friend during the late froid d'enfer, as a Frenchman might say. ‘Trying weather!’ said I; ‘convicting weather! sentencing weather! penal servitude weather!’

The question between me and the College is simple. I entered that College on what all the world knows was its loudly vaunted principle, that the creed of neither teacher nor student was to be an element of his competence to teach or to learn. After forty years of existence the College, for worldly reasons, has decided that a teacher must not be too well known to be heterodox: he must not be conspicuous as a Unitarian. Breach of faith, surrender of principle, and D. I. O.

But this is not all. Between ourselves, the candidate who has been refused the chair of Mental Philosophy because he is so very wicked a Christian in religion, is also excluded because he is too much of a theist in philosophy. He cannot help founding his psychology on a moral Governor of the universe.

Now, I would not have objected to leaving the existence of God and His action on the minds of men an open question for the best qualified candidate to treat in his own way; but the interference of the College as a college, and a settlement of that question officially, is a step in which it concerns me, with my way of thinking, to take a part.

1806

Augustus De Morgan was born in the year 1806 at Madura, in the Madras Presidency. His father Lieutenant-Colonel De Morgan had held appointments, some of them staff situations, at several stations in India; and at the time of his fifth child's birth had chosen Madura in preference to Vellore on account of its comparative quietness. This choice was fortunate, for the battalion of Colonel De Morgan's regiment commanded by Colonel Fanshawe was at Vellore during the time of the mutiny of the native troops; and thus escaped the terrible outbreak in which several English officers lost their lives, and Colonel Fanshawe was murdered. Even at the quieter stations there was cause for alarm from the general disaffection of the native troops, and my husband's mother told how she, being then near her confinement, saw Colonel De Morgan, when the sentries were changed, creep out of bed to listen to the Sepoys, that he might learn if any plot were in agitation, about which information might be given with the password.

Voyage to England

When Augustus was seven months old his father and mother came to England with three children, two daughters and the infant. They sailed in the Duchess of Gordon, one of a convoy of nearly forty ships. The Commodore, Captain (afterwards Admiral) Sir John Beaufort, was on friendly terms with my husband in after life.

1827. William Frend.

It was at this time that he became acquainted with my father, William Frend. They first met at the office of the Nautical Almanac, of which their common friend, Lieutenant Stratford, R.N., had been recently appointed Comptroller. Mr. Frend and Mr. Stratford were both members of the old Mathematical, and subsequently of the Astronomical Society. Though my father was, even at that time, far behind Mr. De Morgan as a mathematician, the two had a good deal of mathematics in common. My father had been second wrangler in a year in which the two highest were close together, and was, as his son-in-law afterwards described him, an exceedingly clear thinker and writer. It is possible, as Mr. De Morgan said, that this mental clearness and directness may have caused his mathematical heresy, the rejection of the use of negative quantities in algebraical operations; and it is probable that he thus deprived himself of an instrument of work, the use of which might have led him to greater eminence in the higher branches. This same heresy gave occasion to many amusing arguments and discussions. But between these two sympathy in matters of morals and principle formed a stronger bond than similarity of pursuit. My father had sacrificed good prospects as a clergyman to his conscientious scruples about the doctrines of the Established Church, as expressed in the Creeds and Articles, and had been through life an earnest advocate of religious liberty.

To Sir J. Herschel.

5 Upper Gower Street, Oct. 16, 1832.

1832

My dear Sir John,—I have just duly received your Catalogue, which must in course of things be the first paper ordered for press, after those already so disposed of. I shall be very much obliged to you for all you have offered on the Catalogue, the Comet, and the Herscheliana. The crumbs which fall from a rich man's table are good—astronomically, whatever they may be gastronomically.

Have you got, or do you know anything of, Bouillaud's or Bullialdi's Astronomia Philolaica? There is a copy in the British Museum which wants the Prolegomena, which is the very part I want. The matter has reference to Vieta's Harmonicon Celeste, which has been supposed to be lost, and which I have a faint hope might be recovered. Bouillaud is reported to say that somebody stole it from Mersenne, and certainly Vossius quotes words to that effect from the Prolegomena. But my good friend M. Hachette assures me that this is a mistake, and that Bouillaud, in his unpublished MS. at Paris, says that he himself lent Vieta's MSS. to Leopold, Duke of Tuscany. If this be true, some library at Florence may yet contain it. I am the more inclined to hope this, as Schootten, in the Preface to Vieta, gives as his reason for omitting the Harmonicon Celeste, not that no copy was to be had, but that the only one he could get appeared imperfect.

To Rev. Dr. Whewell.

Camden Street, Oct. 21, 1846.

1846

My dear Sir,—First, I am very much obliged by your kind invitation, but my lectures are imperative, and I cannot leave town in November.

Next, as to Athenœum police report, you have made worse guesses, unless indeed you never were mistaken in your life.

Now as to the papers. The only wish I have for them to appear in one is that I may get my copies all at one time, and get them disposed of with one trouble. Whether, this condition being fulfilled, they are printed in the form of two papers or one does not matter, and I agree with you that they are distinct enough to be two, and might better be so.

I am going to publish a work on Logic, which, as I told you, will appear soon after the paper. This is sufficient reason for not developing in the paper. Indeed, the Society must know that fact, and take it into consideration in deciding on the printing. There is of course an advantage in new things going first through the usual channels in which scientific matters are propagated, and so I should like the Transactions to have them. But, tota re perspecta, the Society may think otherwise, particularly if there is heavy matter, typographically speaking, on hand already.

To his Mother.

1836

My dear Mother,—I have read your letter carefully; and the papers, and as much of the book as was necessary to show that it contained no argument, and was in fact addressed to those who already believe all it contains. If I can make you see clearly that our modes of arriving at what we believe to be true are so totally different that an attempt to discuss the subject together would be an impossibility, it is all I expect. If your knowledge of the New Testament had been of your own getting, unwarped by the devices of a Church of which it has always been the avowed doctrine to use every means which the age will allow to force men to agree to its own interpretations, I could go much farther, and could show you that taking every book of the New Testament to be an authority to that extent only in which it was recognised as an authority in the first three centuries, and taking the words in their most probable meaning, there is no ground of fear for any honest man who uses the best means in his power to come at truth.

1866

I come now to the last important event of my husband's life—the cessation of his connection with University College. In recording this I wish to dwell as little as possible on the fact, undoubted by all who were near him at the time, that his last illness resulted from mental trouble consequent upon it, in at least as great a degree as from the losses which befell us later. But however painful it is to write it, and however painful it may be to read for the survivors among those who were indirectly responsible for it, I have no choice but to state what was the belief of all who had the means of forming a true judgment.

He had joined University College in his early youth, in opposition to the advice of some of his nearest friends, who believed that his interests would not thereby be promoted, and to the satisfaction only of those in whose minds the upholding of a high principle was a more weighty consideration than worldly success or affluence. He was fully aware how much less lucrative a Professorship in a new institution was likely to be than many appointments which he might have obtained elsewhere. The associations, too, inseparable from a perfectly new institution were less congenial than those in which he would have found himself at either of the two Universities, where he would have worked under and with men whose habits of thought (in some ways) would have been more in harmony with his own.

1846. Theory of the Syllogism

‘In the year 1846,’ Mr. De Morgan wrote, ‘I had begun to collect various matters which had suggested themselves at different times, connected with the theory of the Syllogism in Logic.’ In the year 1847 the Formal Logic was published.

The memoirs On the Syllogism, Nos. I., II., III., IV., and V., are Mathematical workings of the principles developed in the Formal Logic; and the tracts On the Structure of the Syllogism, and On the Application of the Theory of Probabilities to Questions of Argument and Authority, immediately preceded it.

The first chapter of Formal Logic consists, with a few alterations, of the tract entitled First Notions of Logic preparatory to the Study of Geometry; London, 1839. The work as a whole, and in its higher parts, is original, but the author has been careful to distinguish between what he claimed as exclusively his own and the work of others by printing in italics, in the Table of Contents, the headings of those articles which refer to his peculiar system. A reference to this table will show how large and essential a portion was claimed as entirely new. After working these points out in his own mind, the author found that he was able to explain by their means passages of Aristotle till then obscure to himself as well as to others.

1856. Death of Mr. De Morgan's mother

My mother-in-law died after a long illness this year, to the great sorrow of her three sons. Though there was great difference of opinion, chiefly on doctrinal matters, between my husband and herself, there was strong mutual affection, and some resemblances of character. He shared with her the quality which he used to find troublesome when he lived in her house; namely, anxiety to a morbid degree about those she loved when they were out of her sight. If he came home an hour later in the evening than she expected, she conjured up all kinds of terrible accidents which he might have met with. One reason of this, on Augustus's account, was his want of sight on the right-hand side. He was very like her in this morbid anxiety, so that those who left the house in the evening had to be punctual in the time of their return if they wished him to be easy. From his mother he inherited his musical talent, and most probably his mathematical power, for she was the granddaughter of James Dodson, the author of the Mathematical Canon, a distinguished Mathematician, the friend of Demoivre, and of most other men of science of his time, and an early F.R.S. But he was Mathematical master at Christ's Hospital, and some of his descendants seem to have thought this a blot on the scutcheon, for his great-grandson has left on record the impression he had of his ancestor.

To Sir John Herschel.

Camden Street, June 8, 1856.

1856

My dear Sir John,—I have long had the idea of a pianoforte in which each set of strings belonging to one note is to communicate with a pipe for resonance; and sometimes I have thought that a spring at the mouth of a pipe struck by a hammer would make a good instrument. In this case we might have various pedals opening and closing the upper end of the pipe. But I never imagined anything so grand as the introduction of a vast force by means of electro-magnetism. I should propose to call your instrument the electro-magnetic whack-row-de-dow.

What is the reason why thirds and sixths, major or minor, are more pleasant to the ear than fourths and fifths, which are consonances of simpler ratio of vibration? Fifths, by themselves, have a certain something which the ear does not like much of, and consecutive fifths we all know are forbidden. But thirds and sixths are very pleasant. If Dr. Smith's theory of beats be true, I almost suspect I spy a way to explain this. But I must get hold of an organ tuner, and learn whether they are actually effective.

I need hardly say that in the following pages I have not attempted a scientific memoir. My object has been to supply that part of my husband's life the material for which would not be within the reach of another biographer.

The selection from his letters might have been much larger, if I could in all cases have inserted those of his correspondents. Without these many would have been incomprehensible. As it is, I may have over-estimated the attention which readers will be disposed to give to them. My rule in choosing the letters has been to take those which are most characteristic of the writer, and in this way to give to readers already acquainted with him through his writings a more familiar knowledge of him as a man.

His connection with University College, and the events which led to his leaving it, are necessarily made prominent. So long a time has elapsed since their occurrence, and I have known so little during that time of the Institution, that I cannot even surmise how the present Council would in like circumstances share the convictions or conform the action of its predecessors. After the lapse of sixteen years I trust that the narrative will provoke no revival of the somewhat acrimonious controversy which ensued. It might perhaps have been in some ways better that Mr. De Morgan should have published a fuller statement of his views at the time, and have thus left less to be done by his biographer.