The higher class of mathematicians, at the end of the seventeenth
century, had become excellent computers, particularly in England,
of which Wallis, Newton, Halley, the Gregorys, and De Moivre, are
splendid examples. Before results of extreme exactness had become
quite familiar, there was a gratifying sense of power in bringing out
the new methods. Newton, in one of his letters to Oldenburg, says
that he was at one time too much attached to such things, and that
he should be ashamed to say to what number of figures he was in the
habit of carrying his results. The growth of power of computation on
the Continent did not, however, keep pace with that of the same in
England. In 1696, De Laguy, a well-known writer on algebra, and a
member of the Academy of Sciences, said that the most skilful computer
could not, in less than a month, find within a unit the cube root of
696536483318640035073641037.--_De Morgan._
“THE SCIENCE OF THE COSMOS.”
Humboldt, characterises this “uncommon but definite expression” as the
treating of “the assemblage of all things with which space is filled,
from the remotest nebulæ to the climatic distribution of those delicate
tissues of vegetable matter which spread a variegated covering over the
surface of our rocks.” The word _cosmos_, which primitively, in the
Homeric ages, indicated an idea of order and harmony, was subsequently
adopted in scientific language, where it was gradually applied to the
order observed in the movements of the heavenly bodies; to the whole
universe; and then finally to the world in which this harmony was
reflected to us.
Physical Phenomena.