Elements of Algebra

xvi EULER. than with the subject to which he is applying it; and that he seems more taken up with his instruments, than with the work, which they are to assist him in executing. But this can hardly be made a ground of censure, or regret, since it is the very circumstance to which we owe the present perfection of those instruments; a perfection to which he could never have brought them, but by the unremitted attention and enthusiastic preference which he gave to his favorite object. If he now and then exercised his ingenuity on a physical, or perhaps metaphysical, hypothesis, he must have been aware, as well as any one, that his conclusions would of course perish with that from which they were derived. What he regarded, was the proper means of arriving at those conclusions; the new views of analysis, which the investigation might open; and the new expedients of calculus, to which it might eventually give birth. This was his uniform pursuit; all other inquiries were prosecuted with reference to it; and in this consisted the peculiar character of his mathematical genius. The faculties that are subservient to invention he possessed in a very remarkable degree. His memory was at once so retentive and so ready, that he had perfectly at command all those numerous and complex formulæ, which enunciate the rules and more important theorems of analysis. As is reported of Leibnitz, he could also repeat the Æneid from beginning to end; and could trust his recollection for the first and last lines in