44 
JAMES JOSEPH SYLVESTER. 
[900 
Woolwich ; and again, after a five years’ interval, Professor of Mathematics at the 
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S.A., from its foundation in 1877. Finally, 
in December 1883, he was elected Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, in 
succession to Prof. Henry Smith*. His first printed paper was on Fresnel’s optical 
theory (in the Phil. Mag., 1837). 
We can here only briefly allude to a communication which was accompanied by 
many important results : we refer to the Friday evening address (January 23, 1874) 
to the Royal Institution, “ On Recent Discoveries in Mechanical Conversion of Motion.” 
He says :—“ It would be difficult to quote any other discovery which opens out such 
vast and varied horizons as this of Peaucellier’s,—in one direction, descending to the 
wants of the workshop, the simplification of the steam-engine, the revolutionising of 
the mill-wright’s trade, the amelioration of garden-pumps, and other domestic con 
veniences (the sun of science glorifies all it shines upon) ; and in the other, soaring 
to the sublimest heights of the most advanced doctrines of modern analysis, lending 
aid to, and throwing light from a totally unexpected quarter on the researches of 
such men as Abel, Riemann, Clebsch, Grassmann, and Cayley. Its head towers above 
the clouds, while its feet plunge into the bowels of the earth.” 
The only works that Prof. Sylvester has published, we believe, are: (1) “A 
Probationary Lecture on Geometry, delivered before the Gresham Committee and the 
Members of the Common Council of the City of London, December 4, 1854,” a slight 
thing which had to be written and delivered at a few hours’ notice ; (2) “ Laws of 
Verse,” 1870; (3) several short poems, sonnets, and translations, which have appeared 
in our columns and elsewhere. 
Our notice would be incomplete without some record of the honours that have 
been conferred upon Dr Sylvester. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 
April 25, 1839 ; has received a Royal Medal (1860) and the Copley Medal (1880), 
this latter rarely awarded, we believe, to a pure mathematician. On this last occasion, 
Mr Spottiswoode accompanied the presentation with the words, “ His extensive and 
profound researches in pure mathematics, especially his contributions to the theory of 
invariants and covariants, to the theory of numbers and to modern geometry, may be 
regarded as fully establishing Mr Sylvester’s claim to the award.” He is a Fellow 
of New College, Oxford; Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy 
of Sciences ; Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Gottingen, of the 
Royal Academy of Sciences of Naples, and of the Academy of Sciences of Boston ; 
Corresponding Member of the Institute of France, of the Imperial Academy of Science 
of St Petersburg, of the Royal Academy of Science of Berlin, of the Lyncei of 
Rome, of the Istituto Lombardo, and of the Société Philomathique. He has been 
long connected with the editorial staff of the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics (under 
* He commences his Oxford lecture (Nature, vol. xxxiii. p. 222), of date December 12, 1885, with the 
words : “ It is now two years and seven days since a message by the Atlantic cable containing the single 
word ‘ elected ’ reached me in Baltimore informing me that I had been appointed Savilian Professor of 
Geometry in Oxford, so that for three weeks I was in the unique position of filling the post and drawing 
the pay of Professor of Mathematics in each of two Universities.”