his first honor, his earliest distinction; it was not only kindly meant, but timely done; and it no doubt stimulated him to perseverance in his scientific pursuits, as well as created that interest which he always took in the prosperity of that institution.

On quitting the sea, in 1804, he became the President of a Marine Insurance Company in Salem,* the duties of which he continued to discharge till the year 1823, when, on the establishment of "The Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company," in this place, he was elected to the office, being considered the person best qualified for this highly responsible station, from his habits of accurate calculation and rigid method,

* While residing at Salem he was frequently solicited to accept posts of honor and emolument in various literary institutions, in different parts of the country. Though his salary as President of the Insurance Company was small, being only twelve hundred dollars, yet the larger offers from a distance could not induce him to leave his blessed New England home. Thus in 1806, he was chosen to fill the Hollis Professorship of Mathematics at Harvard University, vacated by the promotion of Professor Webber to the Presidency. In 1818, he received a letter from Mr. Jefferson, requesting him to accept the Professorship of Mathematics in the new University at Charlottesville, in Virginia. Mr. Jefferson says in his letter (which is now before me), "We are satisfied we can get from no country a Professor of higher qualifications than yourself for our mathematical department." And in 1820, on the death of Mr. Ellicott, Professor of Mathematics at the United States' Military Academy at West Point, he received a letter from Mr. Calhoun, then Secretary of War, desiring him to permit his name to be presented to the President to fill the vacant chair. Mr. Calhoun says in that letter (which also I have now before me), "I am anxious to avail myself of the first mathematical talents and acquirements to fill the vacancy."

and his inflexible integrity. Immediately on accepting the office he removed to this city at the age of fifty, and has here spent the last fifteen years of his life.

It scarcely needs to be stated that he discharged the duties of his high trust with the greatest fidelity and skill, and to the entire satisfaction of the Company. The capital was five hundred thousand dollars. But, at his suggestion, the Company applied to the Legislature for additional power to hold in trust and loan out the property of individuals. This power was granted; and upwards of five millions of dollars, nine tenths of which belong to females and orphans, have been thus received. and invested. This institution has, in this way, been of incalculable service, it being in fact nothing more nor less than a Savings Bank on a large scale. "Providence"-I use his own language, in his parting letter to the Directors-" has seen fit to bless our efforts to make it an institution deserving of public regard." It deserves to be mentioned, that Dr. Bowditch was never willing to receive and tie up any investment, without himself seeing or hearing in writing from the person in whose behalf the investment was to be made, and ascertaining that it was done with his or her full and free consent, and that the individual perfectly understood the mode and conditions of the investment, before it was put into the dead hand of the institution.

I may here also notice the fact, perhaps not generally known, that during the late unexampled commercial embarrassments and financial difficulties, when almost

all our moneyed institutions have sustained heavy losses from the bankruptcies of their debtors, "and," to use his own words in the same letter, "by having dealt with corporations, whose affairs have been managed with a recklessness which has never before been witnessed in this country," yet so carefully and skilfully have the affairs of The Life Office been managed, that, although the largest moneyed institution in New England, having a capital equal to ten common banks, and with a loan out of six millions, its loss has not been greater than that sustained by some of the smallest banks.

It was a hard struggle for Dr. Bowditch to break away from the pleasant scenes and associations of his native place. There were his earliest friends, and there his strongest ties. But he felt that he owed it to his family to make the sacrifice of personal attachments and preferences; and for some time he and his amiable consort fondly cherished the hope, of returning and spending their last days in the City of Peace.* Soon after his coming to town he joined this religious society, and here continued to worship till the time of his death.

It was in the year 1800 that he married, for his second wife, his cousin, Mary Ingersoll, a lady of singular sweetness of disposition and cheerful piety, and who, by her entire sympathy with him in all his studies and

On his leaving Salem, a public dinner was given him by his fellowcitizens, as a testimony of their respect. No man ever left that place more regretted.

pursuits, lightened and cheered his labors, and by relieving him from all domestic cares, enabled him to go on, with undivided mind and undistracted attention, in the execution of the great work, on which his fame, as a man of science, rests. He has been heard to say, that he never should have accomplished the task, and published the book in its present extended form, had he not been stimulated and encouraged by her. When the serious question was under consideration as to the expediency of his publishing it at his own cost, at the estimated expense of ten thousand dollars (which it actually exceeded), with the noble spirit of her sex, she conjured and urged him to go on and do it, saying that she would find the means, and gladly make any sacrifice and submit to any self-denial that might be involved in it. In grateful acknowledgment of her sympathy and aid, he proposed, in the concluding volume, to dedicate the work to her memory-a design than which nothing could be more beautiful or touching. Let it still be fulfilled.*

It is hardly necessary for me to say that this was a Translation and Commentary on the great work of the French astronomer, La Place, entitled " Mécanique

*This noble-minded and excellent woman, whose unfailing cheerfulness and vivacity rendered her admirably suited to be the wife of such a man, was the daughter of Jonathan and Mary Hodges Ingersoll. She was born December 4, 1781, and died in Boston on the seventeenth of April, 1834. Her father is still living in Windsor, Vt., at the advanced age of eighty-seven years, and his only surviving child, George H., resides at Charlestown, N. H.

Céleste," in which that illustrious man undertakes to explain the whole mechanism of our solar system, to account, on mathematical principles, for all its phenomena, and to reduce all the anomalies in the apparent motions and figures of the planetary bodies, to certain definite laws.* It is a work of great genius and immense depth, and exceedingly difficult to be comprehended. This arises not merely from the intrinsic difficulty of the subject, and the medium of proof employed being the higher branches of the mathematics,—but chiefly from the circumstance that the author, taking it for granted that the subject would be as plain and easy to others as

La Place himself, in his Preface, states the object of his work as follows. "Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Newton published his discovery of universal gravitation. Mathematicians have, since that epoch, succeeded in reducing to this great law of nature all the known phenomena of the system of the world, and have thus given to the theories of the heavenly bodies and to astronomical tables, an unexpected degree of precision. My object is to present a connected view of these theories, which are now scattered in a great number of works. The whole of the results of gravitation, upon the equilibrium and motions of the fluid and solid bodies, which compose the solar system, and the similar systems, existing in the immensity of space, constitute the object of Celestial Mechanics, or the application of the principles of mechanics to the motions and figures of the heavenly bodies. Astronomy, considered in the most general manner, is a great problem of mechanics, in which the elements of the motions are the arbitrary constant quantities. The solution of this problem depends, at the same time, upon the accuracy of the observations, and upon the perfection of the analysis. It is very important to reject every empyrical process, and to complete the analysis, so that it shall not be necessary to derive from observations any but indispensable data. The intention of this work is to obtain, as much as may be in my power, this interesting result."