JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I don’t know how many of you have carried the collected works of physicists or mathematicians–it seems to be a special moment, having someone’s output for their working lives right there in your hands. Some formats of some collected works are just too big and cumbersome (the many small volumes for an early edition of Galileo or the massive 20+ volumes for Huygens), but the Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) volumes seem to be perfect, and finely representative somehow of a fine man and excellent mathematician. So I was saddened to see this about him and his not being able to afford his F.R.S. in a stumbled-upon section of August de Morgan’s (1806-1871) A Budget of Paradoxes (David Eugene Smith’s second edition of Sophia de Morgan’s edited first of 1872):
“This distinction, this mark set by science upon successful investigation, is of necessity a class-distinction. Rowan Hamilton, one of the greatest names of our day in mathematical science, never could attach F.R.S. to his name—he could not afford it. There is a condition precedent—Four Red Sovereigns. It is four pounds a year, or—to those who have contributed to the Transactions—forty pounds down. This is as it should be: the Society must be supported. But it is not as it should be that a kind of title of honor should be forged, that a body should take upon itself to confer distinctions for science, when it is in the background—and kept there when the distinction is trumpeted—that the wearer is a man who can spare four pounds a year. I am well aware that in England a person who is not gifted either by nature or art, with this amount of money power, [30]is, with the mass, a very second-rate sort of Newton, whatever he may be in the field of investigation. Even men of science, so called, have this feeling. I know that the scientific advisers of the Admiralty, who, years ago, received 100 pounds a year each for his trouble, were sneered at by a wealthy pretender as “fellows to whom a hundred a year is an object.” Dr. Thomas Young was one of them. To a bookish man—I mean a man who can manage to collect books—there is no tax. To myself, for example, 40 pounds worth of books deducted from my shelves, and the life-use of the Society’s splendid library instead, would have been a capital exchange. But there may be, and are, men who want books, and cannot pay the Society’s price. The Council would be very liberal in allowing books to be consulted. I have no doubt that if a known investigator were to call and ask to look at certain books, the Assistant-Secretary would forthwith seat him with the books before him, absence of F.R.S. not in any wise withstanding. But this is not like having the right to consult any book on any day, and to take it away, if farther wanted.” –Page 30 (with the italics in the original), from the full text via Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23100/23100-h/23100-h.htm
[Hamilton portrait source: http://www.hamilton2005.ie/]
This fine engraving of Zeno of Elea (490-430 BCE) was printed in 1739 and appeared in Veterum Illustrium Philosophorum, Poetarum, Rhetorim et Oratorum Imagines…by Jo. Petri Bellorii, and published in Rome. It is a fairly large image for a portrait like this, measuring 8.5×5″inches on a sheet 13×9″, engraved on a very heavy and thick paper. 
