PASCAL
(His Mathematical Aptitude.)

The manner in which Pascal learned the mathematics seems to be miraculous. His father perceiving in him an extraordinary inclination to matters of reasoning, was afraid that the knowledge of the mathematics would hinder his learning the languages. He resolved therefore to keep him, as much as he could, from all notions of geometry; he locked up all the books that treated of it, and refrained even to speak of it in his presence, with his friends. Yet he could not refuse this general answer to the importunate curiosity of his son: “geometry is a science which teaches the way of making exact figures, and of finding out the proportions between them;” but at the same time he forbade him to speak or think of it any more. Upon this bare opening of the matter, the child set himself to muse at his house of recreation, and to make figures upon the chamber-floor with charcoal. He sought out the proportions of figures, he himself made definitions and axioms, and then demonstrations, and he carried his enquiries so far, that he came to the thirty-second proposition of the first book of Euclid; for faster having surprized him one day in the midst of his

figures, and having asked him what he was doing, he told him he was searching for such a thing, which was just that proposition of Euclid. He asked him afterwards, what made him think of this, and he answered, that it was because he had found out such another thing; and so going backward and using the names of bar and round, he came at length to the definitions and axioms he had formed himself.

M. le Pailleur learning what had been just said, advised M. Pascal, the father, who told him of it, no longer to constrain his son. M. Pascal followed this advice, and gave Euclid’s Elements to the child, who understood it all by himself alone, without ever needing any explanation, and he improved in it at first so far, that afterwards he was constantly present at the conferences which were held every week, where all the most ingenious men of Paris were assembled, either to bring thither their own works, or to examine those of others. Young Pascal kept his place there, as well as any other, either for examining or writing books. He carried thither, as often as any man, new things, and sometimes it happened, that he discovered faults in the propositions that were examined, which the rest did not perceive. Yet he employed only his time of recreation in the study of geometry, because he was then learning the languages which his father taught him. But finding in those sciences the truth, which he loved in all things with an extreme passion, he made such progress in the little time he spent upon them, that at the age of sixteen years he wrote a treatise on conic sections, which in the judgment of the most learned was accounted one of the greatest efforts of genius that can be imagined. M. Des Cartes, who had been in Holland for a long time, having read it, and having heard some say, that it was written by a child of sixteen years of age, chose rather to believe, that M. Pascal the father, was the true author of it, who

willingly robbed himself of that glory which justly belonged to him, to transfer it to his son, than to be persuaded, that a child of that age, was capable of writing a book with such strength of reason; and by this backwardness to believe a thing which was very true, he shewed that it was in effect incredible and prodigious. At the age of nineteen years he invented that admirable machine of Arithmetic, which was esteemed one of the most extraordinary things that was ever seen: and afterwards at the age of twenty-three years, having seen the Toricellian experiment, he invented and tried a very great number of other new experiments. We must not forget an early proof he gave of his great genius. “When he was yet but eleven years old, at table, a certain person having struck accidentally a fine earthen dish with a knife, he took notice, that it made a great sound, but as soon as the hand was laid upon it, the sound ceased. He wanted at the same time to know the cause of it; and this experiment having led him to make many others about sounds, he observed so many things about them, that he wrote a tract upon that subject, which was judged very ingenious and solid.”—Art. Pascal.