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I find among the signatures to a petition against the reinstatement of an elevated railroad in Boston, such names as Adams, Morse, Lowell, Emerson, Bowditch, Lothrop, Storey, Dabney, Whipple, Ticknor, and Hale. In contrast to this I may mention another list of names which came under my notice at the same time a list of the purchasers at a sale by auction of seats for a New York first-night.
Bowditch was attached to the mission as scientific observer, his chief duty being to take the latitude and longitude of the different places visited. Frederick James and Bowditch left the English settlement on the 22nd August, 1817, and arrived at Coomassie, the Ashantee capital, without meeting with any other obstacle than the insubordination of the bearers.
Bowditch's notes has little idea of the difficulties to be met in the original work. Even Dr. Bowditch himself said, "I never come across one of Laplace's 'Thus it plainly appears, without feeling sure that I have got hours of hard study before me, to fill up the chasm and show how it plainly appears."
"Yes, and she looks pulled down, poor kid!" "You've seen her, then?" "Oh, I see her now and then. Betty Bowditch had her to dinner, and now and then she and I go to tea, and she tells me about her troubles, her young men, and the other women in the play!" "I wonder if she wouldn't come down to us for a week?" Rachael said pleasantly. Warren brightened enthusiastically.
These poor fishermen are not rich, as I have said; a dollar looks to them as big as a dinner-plate to us, and a moderately flush Wall-Street man might buy out the whole Cape and not overdraw his bank-account. Also, they have but little book-learning among them, reading chiefly their Bible, Bowditch, and Nautical Almanac, and leaving theology mostly to the parson, on shore, who is paid for it.
So familiar a designation of the great Bowditch LL. D. and a member of the Royal Societies of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin quite shocked me. I was then in my twenty-second year, but it was the first time I had ever seen any one who was familiar with the "Mécanique Céleste."
But there was hospitable Vera Villalonga and her dreadful New Year's dance, and there were the Bowditch dinner and the Hoyt dinner and the Parmalee's dance for Katrina. Unwillingly the beautiful Mrs. Gregory yielded to the swift current, and presently they were caught in the rush of the season, and could not have withdrawn themselves except for serious cause.
Swiftly now I move across the border into manhood a serious, eager, restless manhood. It was the fashion of the young those days. I spent a summer of hard work in the fields. Evenings I read the books which Mr. Wright had loaned to me, Blackstone's Commentaries and Greenleaf on Evidence and a translation by Doctor Bowditch of LaPlace's Mécanique Celeste. The latter I read aloud.
His face showed no more than an amused indulgence to her caprice, but Rachael knew he was pleased. "Well, when you first planned this outfit I thought it was going to be an awful mess," said he, turning her slowly about. "But it isn't so bad!" "Isn't so bad!" Mrs. Bowditch said scornfully; "it's the loveliest thing I ever saw.
With some of these visitors the friendship was kept up for years. It was in this library that she found La Place's "Mécanique Céleste," translated by her father's friend, Dr. Bowditch; she also read the "Theoria Motus," of Gauss, in its original Latin form. In her capacity as librarian Miss Mitchell to a large extent controlled the reading of the young people in the town.
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