"
Pilgrims in future ages will doubtless visit the spot commemorated by
the invention of Quaternions. Perhaps as they look at that by no
means graceful structure Quaternion Bridge, they will regret that the
hand of some Old Mortality had not been occasionally employed in
cutting the memorable inscription afresh. It is now irrecoverably
lost.
It was ten years after the discovery that the great volume appeared
under the title of "Lectures on Quaternions," Dublin, 1853. The
reception of this work by the scientific world was such as might have
been expected from the extraordinary reputation of its author, and
the novelty and importance of the new calculus. His valued friend,
Sir John Herschel, writes to him in that style of which he was a
master:--
"Now, most heartily let me congratulate you on getting out your
book--on having found utterance, ore rotundo, for all that labouring
and seething mass of thought which has been from time to time sending
out sparks, and gleams, and smokes, and shaking the soil about you;
but now breaks into a good honest eruption, with a lava stream and a
shower of fertilizing ashes.
"Metaphor and simile apart, there is work for a twelve-month to any
man to read such a book, and for half a lifetime to digest it, and I
am glad to see it brought to a conclusion.
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