Louisiane Ferlier looks at the three books donated to the Royal Society Library by mathematician Augustus De Morgan, all with intriguing inscriptions and insertions.
In a previous article, I looked at some bookmarks left by chance in various volumes on the shelves of the Royal Society. Here, I’m going to focus on pieces of papers left intentionally by one of my favourite reader-donor-grangeriser-annotators in our library, second only to Henry Dircks: the mathematician Augustus De Morgan.
Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871), The National Portrait Gallery, Creative Commons licence
While Dircks donated books to the Royal Society Library likely to earn himself recognition and potentially election to the Fellowship, De Morgan’s donations and inscriptions sought to showcase and remedy what he saw as deficiencies in the library collections and the institution’s historical biases. Rebekah Higgitt has previously discussed De Morgan’s refusal to become an FRS: ‘I cannot enter the Royal Society – Quant à la physique, want of time: Quant à la morale, difference of principle’, he wrote.
However, Augustus De Morgan did give three volumes to the Royal Society Library:
- François Viète, Canon mathematicus seu ad triangula cum adpendicibus (1579), donated in 1846
- Robert Browne, Methods, propositions and problems, for finding the latitude (1714), in 1857
- Peter Walter, Some papers proper to be read before the R---l Society, concerning the terrestrial chrysipus (1743), in 1863
The earliest – a first edition by the French mathematician Viète, who developed algebraic notation – is a rare gift indeed: a copy sold at a 2008 auction for a whopping $92,500. A note in De Morgan’s hand is inserted in the flyleaf of the book, noting a missing erratum and commenting on the significance of the volume in the history of mathematics:
De Morgan’s annotation to Viète’s Canon mathematicus
The date of the presentation indicates that De Morgan, an avid collector of mathematical volumes, had spotted that the Royal Society did not have the canonical work. At the time, he was inspecting the ‘Royal Society library, the stock of Mr [Samuel] Maynard the mathematical bookseller, and my own collections, with a few from the British Museum and the libraries of private friends’ ahead of publishing his catalogue of Arithmetical books, from the invention of printing to the present time.
The next donation is the one that first caught my attention. It contains a short piece by Augustus De Morgan, originally published as ‘Book Dust’ in Notes and Queries, in which he suggested that the Royal Society Library had been purged of volumes that could be considered to be critical of Isaac Newton.
De Morgan’s inserts and annotations to Browne’s Methods … for finding the latitude
De Morgan seems to have acquired Browne’s work on latitude some time before 1857, and described it in Notes and Queries as ‘his copy’, but the title page bears a previous provenance:
‘This Book was presented to the Royal Society by the Author Octobr: 17. 1728.’
De Morgan took this as evidence that, sometime around 1730, ‘an expurgatorial visit had been paid, for the purpose of expelling everything which might be grating to a strong Newtonian, even to works which use the infinitesimal principle or the differential notation’. He had convincingly proved elsewhere that the Royal Society took Newton’s side in his controversy with Leibniz, rather than proceeding in a neutral and objective manner, and took the expurgation as a further proof of institutional bias.
I’ve not yet been able to establish whether there was an attempt to censor anti-Newtonian books: De Morgan’s one volume seems flimsy evidence, and it seems far more plausible that it was the Librarian’s usual headache of people not returning loans. Interestingly, De Morgan did not consider theft an option, despite his friendship with the mathematician and infamous librarian-turned-book-thief Guglielmo Libri (a fine case of nominative determinism).
Finally, the tract published under Peter Walter’s name (above) is a satire, attributed by De Morgan to Henry Fielding, of an article on freshwater polyps published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. As with Browne’s volume, De Morgan furnished the copy with his related publication in Notes and Queries and added a handwritten note.
Interestingly, today we hold second copies of both François Viete’s Canon mathematicus and Peter Walter’s Some papers proper to be read before the R---l Society. I would need to dig into our historical catalogues to establish whether the latter had in fact been in the collections at the time of De Morgan’s donation, but the former was donated in 1863 by De Morgan’s contemporary and fellow mathematician, Charles Watkins Merrifield:
If you’re interested in De Morgan’s library, you can read this chapter by Karen Attar in a newly-published volume on De Morgan. Our very own archivist Virginia Mills contributed a section on the Royal Society’s manuscript holdings to a chapter entitled ‘Augustus De Morgan: the archival record’.
What puzzles me most in this entire business is the fact that Augustus De Morgan, who ardently refused to be elected to the Fellowship, was given free rein to inspect the Royal Society Library, supposedly open only to Fellows. Unfortunately, there’s a gap in the Library Committee Minutes for 1836 to 1857, and so the permission to inspect the volumes does not survive.
I have found some interesting details of other unexpected visitors to the Royal Society library in the 1850s, however, and I’ll be giving a paper on this topic at our upcoming Libraries of Science conference. This will take place on Friday 14 March, and you’ll be able to hear a range of speakers discussing scientific book collections and their uses, in what promises to be a fascinating day. If you’d like to attend in person, you can book via the link above – but hurry, tickets are going fast!
