(1817), member of the Bureau of Longitudes (1822), and teacher
of mathematics in the Lycee Louis-le-Grand. Having lost his money through
speculations he left France for the United States in 1831 and became
connected with the government survey of the Mississippi Valley.

[702] This was Alexis Bouvard (1767-1843), who made most of the
computations for Laplace's _Mecanique celeste_ (1793). He discovered eight
new comets and calculated their orbits. In his tables of Uranus (1821) he
attributed certain perturbations to the presence of an undiscovered planet,
but unlike Leverrier and Adams he did not follow up this clue and thus
discover Neptune.

[703] Patrick Murphy (1782-1847) awoke to find himself famous because of
his natural guess that there would be very cold weather on January 20,
although that is generally the season of lowest temperature. It turned out
that his forecasts were partly right on 168 days and very wrong on 197
days.

[704] He seems to have written nothing else. If one wishes to enter into
the subject of the mathematics of the Great Pyramid there is an extensive
literature awaiting him. Richard William Howard Vyse (1784-1853) published
in 1840 his _Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837_, and
in this he made a beginning of a scientific metrical study of the subject.
Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900), astronomer Royal for Scotland (1845-1888)
was much carried away with the number mysticism of the Great Pyramid, so
much so that he published in 1864 a work entitled _Our Inheritance in the
Great Pyramid_, in which his vagaries were set forth. Although he was then
a Fellow of the Royal Society (1857), his work was so ill received that
when he offered a paper on the subject it was rejected (1874) and he
resigned in consequence of this action. The latest and perhaps the most
scholarly of all investigators of the subject is William Matthew Flinders
Petrie (born in 1853), Edwards professor of Egyptology at University
College, London, whose _Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh_ (1883) and
subsequent works are justly esteemed as authorities.

[705] As De Morgan subsequently found, this name reversed becomes Oliver
B...e, for Oliver Byrne, one of the odd characters among the minor
mathematical writers of the middle of the last century. One of his most
curious works is _The first six Books of the Elements of Euclid; in which
coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters_ (1847). There is
some