ionery office. The word is used in the same sense in the United
States, as comptroller of the treasury, an official who examines
accounts and signs drafts, and comptroller of the currency, who
administers the law relating to the national banks.

COMPURGATION (from Lat. _compurgare_, to purify completely), a mode of
procedure formerly employed in ecclesiastical courts, and derived from
the canon law (_compurgatio canonica_), by which a clerk who was accused
of crime was required to make answers on the oath of himself and a
certain number of other clerks (compurgators) who would swear to his
character or innocence. The term is more especially applied to a
somewhat similar procedure, the old Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon mode of
trial by oath-taking or oath-helping (see JURY).

COMTE, AUGUSTE [ISIDORE AUGUSTE MARIE FRANCOIS XAVIER] (1798-1857),
French Positive philosopher, was born on the 19th of January 1798 at
Montpellier, where his father was a receiver-general of taxes for the
district. He was sent for his earliest instruction to the school of the
town, and in 1814 was admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique. His youth
was marked by a constant willingness to rebel against merely official
authority; to genuine excellence, whether moral or intellectual, he was
always ready to pay unbounded deference. That strenuous application
which was one of his most remarkable gifts in manhood showed itself in
his youth, and his application was backed or inspired by superior
intelligence and aptness. After he had been two years at the Ecole
Polytechnique he took a foremost part in a mutinous demonstration
against one of the masters; the school was broken up, and Comte like the
other scholars was sent home. To the great dissatisfaction of his
parents, he resolved to return to Paris (1816), and to earn his living
there by giving lessons in mathematics. Benjamin Franklin was the
youth's idol at this moment. "I seek to imitate the modern Socrates," he
wrote to a school friend, "not in talents, but in way of living. You
know that at five-and-twenty he formed the design of becoming perfectly
wise and that he fulfilled his design. I have dared to undertake the
same thing, though I am not yet twenty." Though Comte's character and
aims were as far removed as possible from Franklin's type, neither
Franklin nor any man that ever lived could surpass him in the heroic
tenacity with which, in the face of a thousand obstacles, he pursued his
own