writing from memory, for
he gives the wrong year. But he has given the paragraph, though not
accurately, yet with such a recollection of the points as brings suspicion
of the authorship upon him, perhaps in conjunction with D. B.[631] Both
were on Cavendish's committee. Mr. Babbage adds, that "late one evening a
cab drove up in hot haste to the office of the _Morning Post_, delivered
the copy as coming from Mr. Goulburn's committee, and at the same time
ordered fifty extra copies of the _Post_ to be sent next morning to their
committee-room." I think the man--the only one I ever heard of--who knew
all about the cab and the extra copies must have known more.]

ON M. DEMONVILLE.

_Demonville._--A Frenchman's Christian name is his own secret, unless there
be two of the surname. M. Demonville is a very good instance of the
difference between a {292} French and English discoverer. In England there
is a public to listen to discoveries in mathematical subjects made without
mathematics: a public which will hear, and wonder, and think it possible
that the pretensions of the discoverer have some foundation. The unnoticed
man may possibly be right: and the old country-town reputation which I once
heard of, attaching to a man who "had written a book about the signs of the
zodiac which all the philosophers in London could not answer," is fame as
far as it goes. Accordingly, we have plenty of discoverers who, even in
astronomy, pronounce the learned in error because of mathematics. In
France, beyond the sphere of influence of the Academy of Sciences, there is
no one to cast a thought upon the matter: all who take the least interest
repose entire faith in the Institute. Hence the French discoverer turns all
his thoughts to the Institute, and looks for his only hearing in that
quarter. He therefore throws no slur upon the means of knowledge, but would
say, with M. Demonville: "A l'egard de M. Poisson,[632] j'envie loyalement
la millieme partie de ses connaissances mathematiques, pour prouver mon
systeme d'astronomie aux plus incredules."[633] This system is that the
only bodies of our system are the earth, the sun, and the moon; all the
others being illusions, caused by reflection of the sun and moon from the
ice of the polar regions. In mathematics, addition and subtraction are for
men; multiplication and division, which are in truth creation and
destruction, are prerogatives of deity. But _nothing_ multiplied by
_nothing_ is _on