The accounts given of extraordinary children and adolescents frequently defy credence.[477] I will give two well-attested instances.
The celebrated mathematician Alexis Claude Clairault (now Clairaut)[478] was certainly born in May, 1713. His treatise on curves of double curvature (printed in 1731)[479] received {220} the approbation of the Academy of Sciences, August 23, 1729. Fontenelle, in his certificate of this, calls the author sixteen years of age, and does not strive to exaggerate the wonder, as he might have done, by reminding his readers that this work, of original and sustained mathematical investigation, must have been coming from the pen at the ages of fourteen and fifteen. The truth was, as attested by De Molieres,[480] Clairaut had given public proofs of his power at twelve years old. His age being thus publicly certified, all doubt is removed: say he had been--though great wonder would still have been left--twenty-one instead of sixteen, his appearance, and the remembrances of his friends, schoolfellows, etc., would have made it utterly hopeless to knock off five years of that age while he was on view in Paris as a young lion. De Molieres, who examined the work officially for the _Garde des Sceaux_, is transported beyond the bounds of official gravity, and says that it "ne merite pas seulement d'etre imprime, mais d'etre admire comme un prodige d'imagination, de conception, et de capacite."[481]
That Blaise Pascal was born in June, 1623, is perfectly well established and uncontested.[482] That he wrote his conic sections at the age of sixteen might be difficult to establish, though tolerably well attested, if it were not for {221} one circumstance, for the book was not published. The celebrated theorem, "Pascal's hexagram,"[483] makes all the rest come very easy. Now Curabelle,[484] in a work published in 1644, sneers at Desargues,[485] whom he quotes, for having, in 1642, deferred a discussion until "cette grande proposition nommee le Pascale verra le jour."[486] That is, by the time Pascal was nineteen, the _hexagram_ was circulating under a name derived from the author. The common story about Pascal, given by his sister,[487] is an absurdity which no doubt has prejudiced many against tales of early proficiency. He is made, when quite a boy, to invent geometry _in the order of Euclid's propositions_: as if that order were natural sequence of investigation. The hexagram at ten years old would be a hundred times less unlikely.
The instances named are painfully astonishing: I give one which has fallen out of sight, because it will preserve an imperfect biography. John Wilson[488] is Wilson of that {222} Ilk, that is, of "Wilson's Theorem." It is this: if _p_ be a prime number, the product of all the numbers up to _p_-1, increased by 1, is divisible without remainder by _p_. All mathematicians know this as Wilson's theorem, but few know who Wilson was. He was born August 6, 1741, at the Howe in Applethwaite, and he was heir to a small estate at Troutbeck in Westmoreland. He was sent to Peterhouse, at Cambridge, and while an undergraduate was considered stronger in algebra than any one in the University, except Professor Waring, one of the most powerful algebraists of the century.[489] He was the senior wrangler of 1761, and was then for some time a private tutor. When Paley,[490] then in his third year, determined to make a push for the senior wranglership, which he got, Wilson was recommended to him as a tutor. Both were ardent in their work, except that sometimes Paley, when he came for his lesson, would find "Gone a fishing" written on his tutor's outer door: which was insult added to injury, for Paley was very fond of fishing. Wilson soon left Cambridge, and went to the bar. He practised on the northern circuit with great success; and, one day, while passing his vacation on his little property at Troutbeck, he received information, to his great surprise, that Lord Thurlow,[491] with whom he had {223} no acquaintance, had recommended him to be a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. He died, Oct. 18, 1793, with a very high reputation as a lawyer and a Judge. These facts are partly from Meadley's _Life of Paley_,[492] no doubt from Paley himself, partly from the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and from an epitaph written by Bishop Watson.[493] Wilson did not publish anything: the theorem by which he has cut his name in the theory of numbers was communicated to Waring, by whom it was published. He married, in 1788, a daughter of Serjeant Adair,[494] and left issue. _Had a family_, many will say: but a man and his wife are a family, even without children. An actuary may be allowed to be accurate in this matter, of which I was reminded by what an actuary wrote of another actuary. William Morgan,[495] in the life of his uncle Dr. Richard Price,[496] says that the Doctor and his {224} wife were "never blessed with an addition to their family." I never met with such accuracy elsewhere. Of William Morgan I add that my surname and pursuits have sometimes, to my credit be it said, made a confusion between him and me. Dates are nothing to the mistaken; the last three years of Morgan's life were the first three years of my actuary-life (1830-33). The mistake was to my advantage as well as to my credit. I owe to it the acquaintance of one of the noblest of the human race, I mean Elizabeth Fry,[497] who came to me for advice about a philanthropic design, which involved life questions, under a general impression that some Morgan had attended to such things.[498]
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