all on the banks of the lagoon. The swamps of which originally Lagos Island entirely consisted have been reclaimed. In connexion with this work a canal, 25 ft. wide, has been cut right through the island and a sea-wall built round its western half. There is a commodious public hospital, of the cottage type, on a good site. There is a racecourse, which also serves as a general public recreation ground. Shifting banks of sand form a bar at the sea entrance of the lagoon. Extensive works were undertaken in 1908 with a view to making Lagos an open port. A mole has been built at the eastern entrance to the harbour and dredgers are at work on the bar, which can be crossed by vessels drawing 13 ft. Large ocean-going steamers anchor not less than 2 m. from land, and goods and passengers are there transhipped into smaller steamers for Lagos. Heavy cargo is carried by the large steamers to Forcados, 200 m. farther down the coast, transhipped there into branch boats, and taken via the lagoons to Lagos. The port is 4279 m. from Liverpool, 1203 from Freetown, Sierra Leone (the nearest safe port westward), and 315 from Cape Coast.
The inhabitants, about 50,000, include, besides the native tribes, Sierra Leonis, Fanti, Krumen and the descendants of some 6000 Brazilian emancipados who were settled here in the early days of British rule. The Europeans number about 400. Rather more than half the populace are Moslems.
LAGOS, a seaport of southern Portugal, in the district of Faro
(formerly the province of Algarve); on the Atlantic Ocean, and
on the estuary of the small river Lagos, here spanned by a fine
stone bridge. Pop. (1900) 8291. The city is defended by fortifications
erected in the 17th century. It is supplied with water
by an aqueduct 800 yds. long. The harbour is deep, capacious,
and completely sheltered on the north and west; it is frequently
visited by the British Channel fleet. Vines and figs are extensively
cultivated in the neighbourhood, and Lagos is the centre of
important sardine and tunny fisheries. Its trade is chiefly
carried on by small coasting vessels, as there is no railway.
Lagos is on or near the site of the Roman Lacobriga. Since the
15th century it has held the formal rank and title of city. Cape
St Vincent, the ancient Promontorium Sacrum, and the south-western
extremity of the kingdom, is 22 m. W. It is famous
for its connexion with Prince Henry (q.v.), the Navigator, who
here founded the town of Sagres in 1421; and for several
British naval victories, the most celebrated of which was won
in 1797 by Admiral Jervis (afterwards Earl St Vincent) over a
larger Spanish squadron. In 1759 Admiral Boscawen defeated
a French fleet off Lagos. The great earthquake of 1755 destroyed
a large part of the city.
LA GRÂCE, or Les Grâces, a game invented in France during
the first quarter of the 19th century and called there le jeu des
Grâces. It is played with two light sticks about 16 in. long and
a wicker ring, which is projected into the air by placing it over
the sticks crossed and then separating them rapidly. The ring
is caught upon the stick of another player and thrown back,
the object being to prevent it from falling to the ground.
LA GRAND’ COMBE, a town of southern France, in the department
of Gard on the Gardon, 39 m. N.N.W. of Nîmes by rail.
Pop. (1906) town, 6406; commune, 11,292. There are extensive
coal mines in the vicinity.
LAGRANGE, JOSEPH LOUIS (1736–1813), French mathematician,
was born at Turin, on the 25th of January 1736. He
was of French extraction, his great grandfather, a cavalry
captain, having passed from the service of France to that of
Sardinia, and settled in Turin under Emmanuel II. His father,
Joseph Louis Lagrange, married Maria Theresa Gros, only
daughter of a rich physician at Cambiano, and had by her eleven
children, of whom only the eldest (the subject of this notice)
and the youngest survived infancy. His emoluments as treasurer
at war, together with his wife’s fortune, provided him with
ample means, which he lost by rash speculations, a circumstance
regarded by his son as the prelude to his own good fortune; for
had he been rich, he used to say, he might never have known
mathematics.
The genius of Lagrange did not at once take its true bent. His earliest tastes were literary rather than scientific, and he learned the rudiments of geometry during his first year at the college of Turin, without difficulty, but without distinction. The perusal of a tract by Halley (Phil. Trans. xviii. 960) roused his enthusiasm for the analytical method, of which he was destined to develop the utmost capabilities. He now entered, unaided save by his own unerring tact and vivid apprehension, upon a course of study which, in two years, placed him on a level with the greatest of his contemporaries. At the age of nineteen he communicated to Leonhard Euler his idea of a general method of dealing with “isoperimetrical” problems, known later as the Calculus of Variations. It was eagerly welcomed by the Berlin mathematician, who had the generosity to withhold from publication his own further researches on the subject, until his youthful correspondent should have had time to complete and opportunity to claim the invention. This prosperous opening gave the key-note to Lagrange’s career. Appointed, in 1754, professor of geometry in the royal school of artillery, he formed with some of his pupils—for the most part his seniors—friendships based on community of scientific ardour. With the aid of the marquis de Saluces and the anatomist G. F. Cigna, he founded in 1758 a society which became the Turin Academy of Sciences. The first volume of its memoirs, published in the following year, contained a paper by Lagrange entitled Recherches sur la nature et la propagation du son, in which the power of his analysis and his address in its application were equally conspicuous. He made his first appearance in public as the critic of Newton, and the arbiter between d’Alembert and Euler. By considering only the particles of air found in a right line, he reduced the problem of the propagation of sound to the solution of the same partial differential equations that include the motions of vibrating strings, and demonstrated the insufficiency of the methods employed by both his great contemporaries in dealing with the latter subject. He further treated in a masterly manner of echoes and the mixture of sounds, and explained the phenomenon of grave harmonics as due to the occurrence of beats so rapid as to generate a musical note. This was followed, in the second volume of the Miscellanea Taurinensia (1762) by his “Essai d’une nouvelle méthode pour déterminer les maxima et les minima des formules intégrales indéfinies,” together with the application of this important development of analysis to the solution of several dynamical problems, as well as to the demonstration of the mechanical principle of “least action.” The essential point in his advance on Euler’s mode of investigating curves of maximum or minimum consisted in his purely analytical conception of the subject. He not only freed it from all trammels of geometrical construction, but by the introduction of the symbol δ gave it the efficacy of a new calculus. He is thus justly regarded as the inventor of the “method of variations”—a name supplied by Euler in 1766.
By these performances Lagrange found himself, at the age of twenty-six, on the summit of European fame. Such a height had not been reached without cost. Intense application during early youth had weakened a constitution never robust, and led to accesses of feverish exaltation culminating, in the spring of 1761, in an attack of bilious hypochondria, which permanently lowered the tone of his nervous system. Rest and exercise, however, temporarily restored his health, and he gave proof of the undiminished vigour of his powers by carrying off, in 1764, the prize offered by the Paris Academy of Sciences for the best essay on the libration of the moon. His treatise was remarkable, not only as offering a satisfactory explanation of the coincidence between the lunar periods of rotation and revolution, but as containing the first employment of his radical formula of mechanics, obtained by combining with the principle of d’Alembert that of virtual velocities. His success encouraged the Academy to propose, in 1766, as a theme for competition, the hitherto unattempted theory of the Jovian system. The prize was again awarded to Lagrange; and he earned the same distinction with essays on the problem of three bodies in 1772, on the secular equation of the moon in 1774, and in 1778 on the theory of cometary perturbations.
