In the same year, when he was hardly twenty-one, he published a work
entitled, "A Collection of Examples of the Application of the Calculus
to Finite Differences." To our young readers such a title will convey no
meaning; and we refer to it here only to illustrate the industry and
careful thought of the young student, which had rendered possible such a
result.
Returning to Slough, he continued his studies in mathematics, chemistry,
and natural philosophy, and in various publications exhibited that
faculty of observation and analyzation, that intelligence and
scrupulousness in collecting facts, and that boldness in deducing new
inferences from them, which were characteristic of his illustrious
father. The subjects he took up were so abstruse, that we could not hope
to make our readers understand what he accomplished, or how far he
excelled his predecessors in his grasp and comprehension of them. For
instance: if we tell them that in 1820 he wrote a paper "On the Theory
and Summation of Series;" communicated to the Cambridge Philosophical
Society his discovery that the two kinds of rotatory polarization in
rock crystal were related to the plagihedral faces of that mineral; and
issued an able treatise "On Certain Remarkable Instances of Deviation
from Newton's Tints in the Polarized Tints of Uniaxal Crystals,"--they
will gain no very distinct idea of the significance or value of these
researches.
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