THE
EDINBURGH REVIEW,
JULY, 1834.
No. CXX.
BY
Art I.—1. Letter to Sir Humphry Davy, Bart. P.R.S., on theapplication of Machinery to Calculate and Print Mathematical Tables.By CHARLES BABBAGE, Esq. F.R.S. 4to. Printed by order of the House ofCommons.
2. On the Application of Machinery to the Calculation of Astronomicaland Mathematical Tables. By CHARLES BABBAGE, Esq. Memoirs Astron. Soc.Vol. I. Part 2. London: 1822.
3. Address to the Astronomical Society, by Henry Thomas Colebrooke,Esq. F.R.S. President, on presenting the first gold medal of the Societyto Charles Babbage, Esq. for the invention of the Calculating Engine.Memoirs Astron. Soc. Vol. I. Part 2. London: 1822.
4. On the determination of the General Term of a new Class of InfiniteSeries. By CHARLES BABBAGE, Esq. Transactions Camb. Phil. Soc.Cambridge: 1824.
5. On Errors common to many Tables of Logarithms. By CHARLESBABBAGE, Esq. Memoirs Astron. Soc. London: 1827.
6. On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery.By CHARLES BABBAGE, Esq. Phil. Trans. London: 1826.
7. Report by the Committee appointed by the Council of the RoyalSociety to consider the subject referred to in a Communication receivedby them from the Treasury, respecting Mr Babbage's Calculating Engine,and to report thereupon. London: 1829.
THERE is no position in society moreenviable than that of the few who unite a moderate independence withhigh intellectual qualities. Liberated from the necessity of seekingtheir support by a profession, they are unfettered by its restraints,and are enabled to direct the powers of their minds, and to concentratetheir intellectual energies on those objects exclusively to which theyfeel that their powers may be applied with the greatest advantage to thecommunity, and with the most lasting reputation to themselves. On theother hand, their middle station and limited income rescue them fromthose allurements to frivolity and dissipation, to which rank and wealthever expose their possessors. Placed in such favourable circumstances,Mr Babbage selected science as the field of his ambition; and hismathematical researches have conferred on him a high reputation,wherever the exact sciences are studied and appreciated. The suffragesof the mathematical world have been ratified in his own country, wherehe has been elected to the Lucasian Professorship in his ownUniversity—a chair, which, though of inconsiderable emolument, isone on which Newton has conferred everlasting celebrity. But it has beenthe fortune of this mathematician to surround himself with fame ofanother and more popular kind, and which rarely falls to the lot ofthose who devote their lives to the cultivation of the abstractsciences. This distinction he owes to the announcement, some yearssince, of his celebrated project of a Calculating Engine. A propositionto reduce arithmetic to the dominion of mechanism,—to substitutean automaton for a compositor,—to throw the powers of thought intowheel-work could not fail to awaken the attention of the world. To bringthe practicability of such a project within the compass of popularbelief was not easy: to do so by bringing it within the compass ofpopular comprehension was not possible. It transcended