|
a + bn n | = x |
donc Dieu existe; répondez!"[[637]] Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, though this is expressed in a very roundabout way by Thiébault—and whom we may suppose to have expected some verbal argument of alleged algebraical closeness, was disconcerted; while peals of laughter sounded on all sides. Next day he asked permission to return to France, which was granted. An algebraist would have
turned the tables completely, by saying, "Monsieur! vous savez bien que votre raisonnement demande le développement de x suivant les puissances entières de n".[[638]] Goldsmith could not have seen the anecdote, or he might have been supposed to have drawn from it a hint as to the way in which the Squire demolished poor Moses.
The graphomath is a person who, having no mathematics, attempts to describe a mathematician. Novelists perform in this way: even Walter Scott now and then burns his fingers. His dreaming calculator, Davy Ramsay, swears "by the bones of the immortal Napier." Scott thought that the the philomaths worshiped relics: so they do, in one sense. Look into Hutton's[[639]] Dictionary for Napier's Bones, and you shall learn all about the little knick-knacks by which he did multiplication and division. But never a bone of his own did he contribute; he preferred elephants' tusks. The author of Headlong Hall[[640]] makes a grand error, which is quite high science: he says that Laplace proved the precession of the equinoxes to be a periodical inequality. He should have said the variation of the obliquity. But the finest instance is the following: Mr. Warren,[[641]] in his well-wrought tale of the martyr-philosopher, was incautious enough to invent the symbols by which his savant satisfied himself Laplace[[642]] was right on a doubtful point. And this is what he put together—
√-3a2,
Now, to Diderot and the mass of mankind this might be Laplace all over: and, in a forged note of Pascal, would
prove him quite up to gravitation. But I know of nothing like it, except in the lately received story of the American orator, who was called on for some Latin, and perorated thus: "Committing the destiny of the country to your hands, Gentlemen, I may without fear declare, in the language of the noble Roman poet,
E pluribus unum,
Multum in parvo,