_John Walsh_,[591] of Cork (1786-1847). This discoverer has had the honor
of a biography from Professor Boole, who, at my request, collected
information about him on the scene of his labors. It is in the
_Philosophical Magazine_ for November, 1851, and will, I hope, be
transferred to some biographical collection where it may find a larger
class of readers. It is the best biography of a single hero of the kind
that I know. Mr. Walsh introduced himself to me, {261} as he did to many
others, in the anterowlandian days of the Post-office; his unpaid letters
were double, treble, &c. They contained his pamphlets, and cost their
weight in silver: all have the name of the author, and all are in octavo or
in quarto letter-form: most are in four pages, and all dated from Cork. I
have the following by me:
The Geometric Base, 1825.--The theory of plane angles. 1827.--Three
Letters to Dr. Francis Sadleir. 1838.--The invention of polar geometry.
By Irelandus. 1839.--The theory of partial functions. Letter to Lord
Brougham. 1839.--On the invention of polar geometry. 1839.--Letter to
the Editor of the Edinburgh Review. 1840.--Irish Manufacture. A new
method of tangents. 1841.--The normal diameter in curves. 1843.--Letter
to Sir R. Peel. 1845.--[Hints that Government should compel the
introduction of Walsh's Geometry into Universities.]--Solution of
Equations of the higher orders. 1845.
Besides these, there is a _Metalogia_, and I know not how many others.
Mr. Boole,[592] who has taken the moral and social features of Walsh's
delusions from the commiserating point of view, which makes ridicule out of
place, has been obliged to treat Walsh as Scott's Alan Fairford treated his
client Peter Peebles; namely, keep the scarecrow out of court while the
case was argued. My plan requires me to bring him in: and when he comes in
at the door, pity and sympathy fly out at the window. Let the reader
remember that he was not an ignoramus in mathematics: he might have won his
spurs if he could have first served as an esquire. Though so illiterate
that even in Ireland he never picked up anything more Latin than
_Irelandus_, he was a very pretty mathematician spoiled in the making by
intense self-opinion.
This is part of a private letter to me at the back of a page of print: I
had never addressed a word to him:
{262}
"There are no limits in mathematics, and those that assert there are, are
infinite ruffians, ignorant, lying blackguards. There is no differential
calculus, no Taylor's theorem, no calculus of variations, &c. in
mathematics. There is no quackery whatever in mathematics; no % equal to
anything. What sheer ignorant blackguardism that!
"In mechanics the parallelogram of forces is quackery, and is dangerous;
for nothing is at rest, or in uniform, or in rectilinear motion, in the
universe. Variable motion is an essential property of matter. Laplace's
demonstration of the parallelogram of forces is a begging of the question;
and the attempts of them all to show that the difference of twenty minutes
between the sidereal and actual revolution of the earth round the sun
arises from the tugging of the Sun and Moon at the pot-belly of the earth,
without being sure even that the earth has a pot-belly at all, is perfect
quackery. The said difference arising from and demonstrating the revolution
of the Sun itself round some distant center."
In the letter to Lord Brougham we read as follows:
"I ask the Royal Society of London, I ask the Saxon crew of that crazy
hulk, where is the dogma of their philosophic god now?... When the Royal
Society of London, and the Academy of Sciences of Paris, shall have read
this memorandum, how will they appear? Like two cur dogs in the paws of the
noblest beast of the forest.... Just as this note was going to press, a
volume lately published by you was put into my hands, wherein you attempt
to defend the fluxions and _Principia_ of Newton. Man! what are you about?
You come forward now with your special pleading, and fraught with national
prejudice, to defend, like the philosopher Grassi,[593] the persecutor of
Galileo, principles {263} and reasoning which, unless you are actually
insane, or an ignorant quack in mathematics, you know are mathematically
false. What a moral lesson this for the students of the University of
London from its head! Man! demonstrate corollary 3, in this note, by the
lying dogma of Newton, or turn your thoughts to something you understand.
"WALSH IRELANDUS."
Mr. Walsh--honor to his memory--once had the consideration to save me
postage by addressing a pamphlet under cover to a Member of Parliament,
with an explanatory letter. In that letter he gives a candid opinion of
himself:
(1838.) "Mr. Walsh takes leave to send the enclosed corrected copy to Mr.
Hutton as one of the Council of the University of London, and to save
postage for the Professor of Mathematics there. He will find in it geometry
more deep and subtle, and at the same time more simple and elegant, than it
was ever contemplated human genius could invent."
He then proceeds to set forth that a certain "tomfoolery lemma," with its
"tomfoolery" superstructure, "never had existence outside the shallow
brains of its inventor," Euclid. He then proceeds thus:
"The same spirit that animated those philosophers who sent Galileo to the
Inquisition animates all the philosophers of the present day without
exception. If anything can free them from the yoke of error, it is the
[Walsh] problem of double tangence. But free them it will, how deeply
soever they may be sunk into mental slavery--and God knows that is deeply
enough; and they bear it with an admirable grace; for none bear slavery
with a better grace than tyrants. The lads must adopt my theory.... It will
be a sad reverse for all our great professors to be compelled to become
schoolboys in their gray years. But the sore scratch is to be compelled, as
they had before been compelled one thousand years ago, to have recourse to
Ireland for instruction." {264}
The following "Impromptu" is no doubt by Walsh himself: he was more of a
poet than of an astronomer:
"Through ages unfriended,
With sophistry blended,
Deep science in Chaos had slept;
Its limits were fettered,
Its voters unlettered,
Its students in movements but crept.
Till, despite of great foes,
Great WALSH first arose,
And with logical might did unravel
Those mazes of knowledge,
Ne'er known in a college,
Though sought for with unceasing travail.
With cheers we now hail him,
May success never fail him,
In Polar Geometrical mining;
Till his foes be as tamed
As his works are far-famed
For true philosophic refining."
Walsh's system is, that all mathematics and physics are wrong: there is
hardly one proposition in Euclid which is demonstrated. His example ought
to warn all who rely on their own evidence to their own success. He was
not, properly speaking, insane; he only spoke his mind more freely than
many others of his class. The poor fellow died in the Cork union, during
the famine. He had lived a happy life, contemplating his own perfections,
like Brahma on the lotus-leaf.[594]
{265}