demnation, Bailly remarked, "It is not for the sad day of the Champ de Mars that I die; my death is caused by the meeting at the Tennis Court." The day of the Tennis Court simply effaced from existence the desolating oligarchy that had almost extinguished France. But from scenes so harrowing, let us at present avert our face.—Bailly's personal inclinations were wholly towards science: happy had he not strayed into the sphere of politics for which he had no aptitude, and which did not suit his character. He has left us a most eloquent history of astronomy from the earliest times, filling five quarto volumes. No more imposing history was ever written. It is not technical, but he seizes the peculiarities of the great discoverers, and gives a true picture of the men even when he fails to describe, with the wished-for accuracy, the special facts they discovered. His sympathies were with greatness: nothing finer has yet been written than his version of the story of Copernicus and Galileo. Throughout this large work, Bailly's feeling of justice shines clear. His errors are on the side of exaggeration. His sense of wonder was possibly in excess; and this may account in part for his aberration respecting the antiquity and perfectness of the Indian astronomy. But, with all its imperfections, his work stands to this hour our only approximation to an extended history of astronomy. Delambre gives us the History of Formulæ; he seems to know nothing and care nothing about any man, unless in so far as he was a formula-maker. Bailly, on the contrary, is full of sympathy, and desired to know alike the men who were the workers, and the ages amidst which they wrought. The rarest of all great historians is, perhaps, the great historian of abstract science.—J. P. N.
BAILLY, Joseph, a medical doctor, born at Besançon in 1779. Attached to the army, he attended the French troops in their unfortunate expedition to Saint Domingo, and afterwards served in the campaigns of Germany and of Russia. He also attended the expedition of 1823 into Spain. The fruits of such varied experience have been preserved in several essays; but he has left no large work; nor, which seems strange, do his essays refer to his own immediate profession, but treat of agriculture, mendicancy, arts, and sciences, with accounts of places he has visited; with memoirs left unfinished. He died in 1823.—J. F. C.
BAILY, Edward Hodges, R.A., F.R.S., one of the best English sculptors of modern times, was born at Bristol in 1788. The son of a ship-carver of good reputation, he began early to have his eye on plastic productions, and to show taste for the art in which he was to become so proficient. Yet his inclination was thwarted for a while, he being destined for commerce. This design was, however, to be frustrated. Young Baily soon left the ledger for the clay and wax, and in a very short time was able to attract the attention and sympathy of the great Flaxman, who received him in his studio, and completed his artistical education. A successful competitor for the silver medal of the Society of Art, and other academical prizes, he put a seal to his reputation by his "Eve at the Fountain," which he produced when only twenty-five years of age. This statue is still the brightest jewel of his glory. By the modest grace and genuine spontaneity of the conception, coupled with the general charm of forms displayed in this work, Baily not only commands the admiration and praises of the connoisseur, but carries with himself the favour of the people at large.
Many and highly important are the works that this sculptor produced during his long and active career, all impressed with a grandiosity and ease of conception that fully reveals the innate genius of the master. Some of his monumental statues, often of a colossal size, are equal, if not superior, to the best of Chantrey; nor did Baily disdain the humbler branch, portrait-busts, in which he exhibited the same characteristics of his larger works, and even displayed a greater amount of care in the details. His latest works, the "Graces" and the "Morning Star," clearly show that at the time they were produced his inventive powers had suffered no decay. While highly esteemed at home, he was considered abroad, with Foley and Macdowell, as one of the great champions of the modern English school of sculpture. He died on the 22nd of May, 1867.—R. M.
BAILY, Francis, born on the 28th April, 1774, at Newbury, Berkshire; died at a ripe age at his residence in London on 30th August, 1844. It is not easy to write of Francis Baily in terms equal to the importance of his labours, his worth as a man, or to the affection with which his memory is cherished by every person of note in the scientific world of Great Britain, or in the higher literary as well as the scientific world of our metropolis. During the earlier portion of his life he occupied himself as a stock-broker at the Exchange, remaining in this position up to the year 1825, and constructing a reputation for practical sagacity and an integrity beyond reach of suspicion, which certainly only a few of those who follow that rather critical and difficult profession have succeeded in attaining. Mr. Baily owed what may be termed prosperity in the trade sense—viz., a large fortune, crowned by honour—to the possession of various qualities not often found together. The first of these was a high moral nature, issuing in scrupulous regard for the rights and claims of others—probity in its practical form. But he had also prudence and sagacity in the widest meaning of these words, and in reference to their widest relations. Nothing is more fallacious than the current notion that sagacity comes necessarily from experience; and that only to know the great laws of commerce, it is requisite to be a broker, a banker, or a merchant. It might be patent in these our times to the man "who runs," that simple practice in a profession bestows neither sagacity nor prudence. A sagacious merchant must be possessed of the reflective and generalizing faculties in a very large degree, before he can comprehend in the least the meaning of those facts and events which calls his "experience," or be able to use the past as a ground from which he may look into the future. How rare this combination! How few mercantile men, even of the prosperous class, can ever become statesmen, the history of the British reformed parliament can emphatically tell! The value universally attached to the practical side of Mr. Baily's nature—if, indeed, one may attribute any side to a nature so complete—is evinced by the fact that he was chosen by the members of the Stock Exchange, to prosecute, or rather to prepare the prosecutor's case, in the celebrated fraud of Du Beranger (that in which Lord Cochrane was supposed to be implicated); and he accomplished his task so admirably, that a chain of evidence made up of links more closely bound together, was never produced in any court of justice. All this while he was producing works establishing great general principles, which are referred to still, and will yet long be referred to as absolute standards. He began with a work on rules for determining the value of Reversions. This was succeeded in 1808 by "The Doctrine of Interest and Annuities Analytically Investigated and Explained;" and in 1810 he produced his "Doctrine of Life Annuities and Insurances Analytically Investigated and Explained." "This is a work," says Sir John Herschel, "in many ways remarkable, and its peculiarities are of a highly characteristic nature; method, symmetry, and lucid order being brought in aid of practical utility in a subject which had never before been so treated, and old routine being boldly questioned and confronted with enlarged experience." In very early life Mr. Baily travelled in western America. In those western wilds he met with Mr. Ellicot, the government-surveyor of the United States; and as companionship in the wilderness is apt to become very close, he seems to have become influenced by the pursuits and difficulties of Ellicot, and especially arrested by his account of that superb display of meteors in 1799, which Ellicot had seen. From that period forth he showed a keen relish for the pursuit of astronomy. It may seem odd that a stock-broker should write on the eclipse of Thales: the wonder is that he did not thereby destroy his character on 'Change! No better illustration has been afforded in modern times of the truth, that relaxation does not consist in sleep or torpor, but in the exercise of different faculties of the soul.—We have not space to enumerate all the services rendered to pure science by Francis Baily. The titles even of his various memoirs—all of them marked by the rare speciality of his intellect—we cannot even enumerate. But this must be said: In every scientific act of Baily, one recognizes the presence of a conscientious and able man of business, and of a lover of pure science. He was one of the founders of the Astronomical Society—perhaps he first of all suggested the project. He wrote much concerning special phenomena—always pointing out the peculiarities in these phenomena that ought to be observed, in order that they be fruitful. He helped towards the remodelling of our nautical almanac; or rather, he was the prime mover in this reform. He analysed our astronomical catalogues, and published lists of querenda. He proposed and helped towards the revision of our catalogues, and the reduction of the catalogues of Lalande and Lacaille. By common consent he took the direction
