In 1864 he resigned his fellowship on his marriage (13 Aug.) to Louisa Anna Maria, eldest daughter of Captain (afterwards Admiral) George Davies, R.N. (at that time head of the county constabulary force). In 1871 he gained the Adams prize, and in the same year was elected a member of the council of the Royal Society. In 1874 he was elected an honorary fellow of his college. In 1880 an affection of the eyes proved a forerunner of an attack of paralysis which eventually prostrated him. He died on 1 March 1884, at his residence, 6 Brookside, Cambridge. A mural tablet and medallion portrait have since been placed in the ante-chapel of his college by his widow, who, with four sons and one daughter, survived him.
Todhunter’s life was mainly that of the studious recluse. His sustained industry and methodical distribution of his time enabled him to acquire a wide acquaintance with general and foreign literature; and besides being a sound Latin and Greek scholar, he was familiar with French, German, Spanish, Italian, and also Russian, Hebrew, and Sanscrit. He was well versed in the history of philosophy, and on three occasions acted as examiner for the moral sciences tripos. His habits and tastes were singularly simple; and to a gentle kindly disposition he united a high sense of honour, a warm sympathy with all that was calculated to advance the cause of genuinely scientific study in the university, and considerable humour.
Besides the text-books above enumerated, he published: 1. ‘A Treatise on the Differential Calculus and the Elements of the Integral Calculus,’ 1852. 2. ‘Analytical Statics,’ 1853. 3. ‘A Treatise on Plane Co-ordinate Geometry,’ 1855. 4. ‘Examples of Analytical Geometry of three Dimensions,’ 1858. 5. ‘The Theory of Equations,’ 1861. 6. ‘History of the Progress of the Calculus of Variations during the Nineteenth Century,’ 1861. 7. ‘History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability from the Time of Pascal to that of Laplace,’ 1865. 8. ‘History of the Mathematical Theories of Attraction from Newton to Laplace,’ 1873. 9. ‘The Conflict of Studies and other Essays on Subjects connected with Education,’ 1873. 10. ‘Elementary Treatise on Laplace’s Functions,’ 1875. 11. ‘History of the Theory of Elasticity,’ a posthumous publication edited by Dr. Karl Pearson (1886).
Todhunter’s publications were the outcome of great research and industry, and he made in them many valuable contributions to the history of mathematical study. His most original work is his ‘Researches on the Calculus of Variations’ (the Adams prize for 1871), dealing with the abstruse question of discontinuity in solution.
[In memoriam: Isaac Todhunter, by Professor J. E. B. Mayor; Dr. Routh in Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. xxxvii; The Eagle, a magazine supported by the members of St. John’s College, xiii. 94 sq.]
TOFT or TOFTS, MARY (1701?-1763), ‘the rabbit-breeder,’ a native of ‘Godlyman’ (i.e. Godalming in Surrey), married in 1720, Joshua Tofts, a journeyman clothier, by whom she had three children. She was very poor and illiterate. On 23 April 1726 she declared that she had been frightened by a rabbit while at work in the fields, and this so reacted upon her reproductive system that she was delivered in the November of that year first of the lights, and guts of a pig and afterwards of a rabbit, or rather a litter of fifteen rabbits. She was attended during her extraordinary confinement by John Howard, the local apothecary, who had practised midwifery for thirty years. Howard is said to have felt the rabbits leaping in the womb, and, being himself completely deceived, he wrote to Nathanael St. André [q.v.], who was then practising as a surgeon to the newly established Westminster Hospital. St André posted to Guildford with his friend Samuel Samuel Molyneux [q.v.], secretary to the Prince of Wales. On 28 Nov. St. André drew up a narrative in which, amid a mass of medical jargon, he described how he himself had delivered the woman of two rabbits (or portions thereof), and expressed his entire belief in the reality of the phenomenon (‘A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets … published by Mr. St. André, Surgeon and Anatomist to His Majesty,’ London, 1727, 8vo, two editions). The news spread like wildfire. Lord Onslow, in a note to Sir Hans Sloane, remarked that the affair had ‘almost alarmed England, and in a manner persuaded several people of sound judgement that it was true.’ ‘I want to know what faith you have in the miracle at Guildford,’ wrote Pope to Caryll on 5 Dec. 1726; ‘all London is divided into factions about it.’ Many believers were found at court, in spite of the gibes of the Prince of Wales. The excitement was probably aided by some marvel-mongering passages in Dr. John Maubray’s ‘Female Physician’ (1724). George I ordered Cyriacus Ahlers, surgeon to his German household, to go down to Guildford and investigate the matter. Ahlers removed a portion of another rabbit, but Howard stigmatised his treatment of the patient as bearish,
