its details. In a letter addressed by him to Bernoulli, in answer to a request of the latter that he would afford a description of the machinery, he says, 'Descriptionem ejus dare accuratam res non facilis foret. De effectu ex eo judicaveris quod ad multiplicandum numerum sex figurarum, e.g. rotam quamdam tantum sexies gyrari necesse est, nulla alia opera mentis, nullis additionibus intervenientibus; quo facto, integrum absolutumque productum oculis objicietur.'[1] He goes on to say that the process of division is performed independently of a succession of subtractions, such as that used by Pascal.
It appears that this machine was one of an extremely complicated nature, which would be attended with considerable expense of construction, and only fit to be used in cases where numerous and expensive calculations were necessary.[2] Leibnitz observes to his correspondent, who required whether it might not be brought into common use, 'Non est facta pro his qui olera aut pisculos vendunt, sed pro observatoriis aut cameris computorum, aut aliis, qui sumptus facile ferunt et multo calculo egent.' Nevertheless, it does not appear that this contrivance, of which the inventor states that he caused two models to be made, was ever applied to any useful purpose; nor indeed do the mechanical details of the invention appear ever to have been published.
Even had the mechanism of these machines performed all which their inventors expected from them, they would have been still altogether inapplicable for the purposes to which it is proposed that the calculating machinery of Mr Babbage shall be applied. They were all constructed with a view to perform particular arithmetical operations, and in all of them the accuracy of the result depended more or less upon manipulation. The principle of the calculating machinery of Mr Babbage is perfectly general in its nature, not depending on any particular arithmetical operation, and is equally applicable to numerical tables of every kind. This distinguishing characteristic was well expressed by Mr Colebrooke in his address to the Astronomical Society on this invention. 'The principle which essentially distinguishes Mr Babbage's invention from all these is, that it proposes to calculate a series of numbers following any law, by the aid of differences, and that by setting a few figures at the outset; a
