In this country Poincaré has become known largely through the efforts of Professor George Bruce Halsted of the State Normal School of Greeley, Colorado, who has translated his philosophical works and has for many years been indefatigable in spreading the new gospel of the non-Euclidian geometry. Professor Halsted has at my request kindly contributed the following account of one of Poincaré's astronomical triumphs and of the visit that Professor Sylvester of Johns Hopkins paid to Poincaré many years ago:
"The kernel of Poincaré's power lies in an oracle Sylvester often quoted from Hesiod: Only the genius knows how much more the part is than the whole. He penetrates at once the divine simplicity of the perfectly general case, and thence descends, as from Olympus, to the special concrete earthly particulars. Thus his memoir of 1885, which Sir George Darwin says came to him as a revelation, on a rotating fluid mass, and his book 'Les Méthodes nouvelles de la Mécanique céleste,' 1892-1899, were ready with prevision when the shocking special case occurred of Phoebe, ninth satellite of Saturn, discovered in 1900, afterward found, incredible as it seemed, to be revolving in the direction contrary to that of all the others. It follows that Saturn himself originally rotated in the reverse direction. Again, on February 29, 1908, was found an eighth satellite of Jupiter, Jviii, revolving round Jove in the shocking Phoebe retrograde direction. Zeus must have turned over. All the planets have turned over, and some are now making another somersault. Moreover, Jviii does not even revolve in a closed orbit; its path is an open twister of unreturning turns.
"For Poincaré the inexhaustible source, the lamp of Aladdin, has ever been the non-Euclidian geometry. In him the Bolyai-Lobachevski-Riemann germ flowers fair.
"Personally Poincaré is the most lovable of men. At our very first meeting I realized that I had already been intimately associated with him for two years in the person of Sylvester. I told him the story of Sylvester's discovery of him, and he showed me how vividly and tenderly reconnaissant he was toward the great old master.
"Midsummer, and up a stuffy Paris stairway labors a giant gnome, beard on enormous chest, fortunately no neck, for no neck could upbear such a monstrous head, bald but for the inverted halo of hair collaring its juncture with the broad shoulders; small inefficient hands holding big hat and damp handkerchief; breath puffing with the heat and exertion. It is Sylvester, self-driven to seek out the source of new creations strangely akin to his own. At the sought door, open, he pauses, seized by doubt, the person within is so young, so slight, so dazed. Can this be the new incarnation of the eternal world-genius of geometry? But the aloof sensitiveness of the face, the broad sphericity of the head reassure him. This is Henri Poincaré. And so the old King finds the True Prince, who in turn finds himself at last truly comprehended, anointed to the succession, and given high heart to establish his dominion."
The sudden death of Henri Poincaré, July 18, 1912, at the age of fifty-eight, shocked the scientific world. This marvelous thinking machine was stopped, this repository of the exact sciences was lost to the world, by the trifling accident of a clot of blood catching in one of the valves of the heart. He had gone to the hospital for a minor operation which was apparently successful. Ten days later he was pronounced well enough to leave and was dressing when he was struck down.
The funeral service at the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas was attended by a remarkable assemblage of men of science and letters, government officials, and representatives of foreign countries. At the Montparnasse cemetery orations were delivered by M. Guist'hau, Minister of Public Instruction, Jules Claretie of the Académie française, M. Appell, dean of the Faculty of Sciences, M. Bigourdan of the Observatory, Paul Painlevé of the Academy of Sciences, and General Cornille, Commandant of the École polytechnique. M. Painlevé said of him:
"The life of Henri Poincaré was one intense and uninterrupted meditation, that despotic and pitiless meditation which bows the shoulders and bends the head, which absorbs the vital influx of one's being and too soon uses up the body it possesses.
"Henri Poincaré was not only a great creator in the positive sciences; he was a great philosopher and a great writer. Certain of his aphorisms remind one of Pascal: 'Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.' His style followed the movement of his thought; brief and arresting formulas, often paradoxical when isolated, joined by hasty explanations which discard the easy details and say only the essential. This is why superficial critics have accused him of being 'incoherent'; the truth being that without some previous scientific education, such logical movement is difficult to follow. Mice cannot keep step with a lion.
"It is likewise a lack of comprehension of his philosophy as a whole that has led certain commentators to think they found a transcendental skepticism in his critical studies of the principles of science. Must he not have had faith in science who has written 'The search for truth ought to be the aim of our activity; it is the sole aim worthy of it'? His philosophy of the rational science will live as long as his own discoveries. The totality of the mathematical sciences seemed to him like a gigantic measuring instrument, harmoniously adjusted and well adapted for the evaluation of the phenomena of the universe. There remains one trait of his character that I cannot pass over in silence; that is his admirable intellectual sincerity. He gave himself, he gave to all, so far as words permit, the whole of his thought and even the mechanism of his thought. In his last publication, appearing only a few days before his death and dealing with the problem of the stability of our universe, he excused himself for giving out such incomplete results: