6

THE CALCULATING PHILOSOPHER'

THE present generation appears to have comparatively forgotten Babbage and his calculating machine. Some few may perhaps have given a momentary, and more or less uninterested, glance at that portion of his 'Difference Engine No. 1' which may still be found by the curious amongst the more neglected of the exhibits in South Kensington Museum; but to the great majority the inventor himself is hardly more than a nominis umbra. Yet Charles Babbage took a prominent part in the social as well as the scientific life of the first half of the nineteenth century. Like Bacon, he would probably have considered his name and fame safe in the keeping of 'foreign nations and the next ages,' but in case there might be a doubt about this, he in 1864, when seventy-two years of age, favoured the public with some account of himself in a volume bearing the not particularly attractive title of Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.

Babbage is said to have been a very plain-looking man, but it may well be doubted whether a portrait of the very plainest-looking author would not have proved more conciliatory, at least to the general

reader, than the uncanny-looking picture of the complicated cogs and wheels of a calculating machine, which he preferred by way of frontispiece. The reader who is undeterred by this, however, will not be without his reward. The first words of the preface, in fact, strike a totally unexpected note, and give promise of an entertainment which, at any rate, is something out of the common.

'Some men,' he says, 'write their lives to save themselves from ennui, careless of the amount they inflict on their readers. Others write their personal history lest some kind friend should survive them, and, in showing off his own talent, unwittingly show them up. Others, again, write their own life from a different motive-from fear that the vampires of literature might make it their prey.'

He has frequently had applications, he says, from persons who were anxious to write his life. Some offered to pay him for the privilege of doing it; others required that he should pay them; and a third class offered to do the work without charge. To many of these persons he sent a list of his published works, with the remark that they formed the best life of an author; and, naturally enough, he heard no more of the matter. He declares that he had no desire to write his own biography, so long as strength and means remained for him to do better work; but being anxious to place on record some authoritative account of his beloved calculating machines, he shrewdly

guessed that this would go down with the general public more readily if intermixed with some relation of the more interesting experiences of a rather varied life.

Concerning his forebears he is provokingly indifferent. Were it possible to trace the matter far enough back, he sarcastically says, one of his progenitors would probably be found to belong to that race of original toolmakers who flourished in the prehistoric stone age. As regards the history of the family in recent times, his knowledge is unfortunately limited, owing to the regrettable omission of his name from the roll of William the Conqueror's followers. He does not even tell the reader when or where he was born, and we have to gather from another source that he lighted on this planet somewhere near Teignmouth in the year 1792, and that he was the son of that Benjamin Babbage, of the banking firm of Praed, Mackworth, and Babbage, who was popularly known as 'Old Five Per Cents.'

The child is father of the man, as Wordsworth tells us, but, so far as our septuagenarian philosopher's memory serves him, there does not appear to have been anything particularly remarkable about his early childhood. He does, indeed, relate that his invariable question on receiving a new toy was: 'Mamma, what is inside of it?' but we have certainly heard of other children, never destined to exhibit the least tincture

of philosophy whatever, who invariably made the same remark. Even as a schoolboy, the one quality which might certainly have been expected to exhibit itself with more than ordinary prominence in a future Lucasian Professor of Mathematics is flatly denied him by one of his schoolfellows, who in after life assured Mrs. Andrew Crosse that so far as arithmetic was concerned Babbage was the stupidest boy in the whole school. Certainly his own account is rather different, for he tells us that not only was he always very partial to all his arithmetical lessons, but that a book entitled Ward's Young Mathematicians' Guide had so powerful an attraction for him that he got up at three o'clock every morning for a little extra study of it. This seems quite sufficiently incredible but Babbage avers that there was also another boy in the school of equally studious habit and abnormal capacity for early rising, and that the two of them rose at three, lit a fire in the schoolroom, and studied Ward's Guide every morning for several months!

Another of Babbage's school chums, Frederick Marryat, afterwards Captain Marryat of sea-story fame, was, as may readily be believed, much more addicted to play and mischief than to work. Babbage relates a curious experiment which he and Marryat made with most astonishing results. It appears that a parlour boarder of Russian nationality had expatiated to

Marryat on the virtues of cognac; and one evening the latter somehow became possessed of a quart bottle of that spirit, which he assured the other boys was excellent stuff to drink. The taste of it, however, not proving generally acceptable, the experimental Babbage suggested that it might be better if mixed up with a lot of treacle. A general subscription for treacle was made forthwith, and this unique liqueur, being duly compounded in a large-sized flower - pot, was served round with spoons and oyster-shells to the assembled boys. Hardly had the delectable confection been consumed when the bell sounded for prayers, and, hastily wiping their lips on handkerchiefs or coat-sleeves, or whatever came handy, the boys trooped in and devoutly knelt at their respective desks. By the time prayers were over, however, the spirit had begun its work. Some of them rose up only to fall down again instantly, some turned round like spinning dervishes, some were merely stupid, some were sound asleep, some were sick, and finally all had to be carried off to bed.

In due time our budding philosopher entered on his university career. The start can hardly be described as promising, for when Babbage senior consulted a tutor of one of the colleges with a view of acquiring information that would be of use to the undergraduate, we are told that all the reverend doctor's admonitions might be summed up in the one sentence: