in Protestant doctrines than other young persons carefully taught by their parents. Little girls, with nerves shaken by cruelty and false alarms, were unshaken in their faith. The boys wore out the patience of their teachers, or kept them so perseveringly on the defensive that categorical instruction could not be given for want of time. To questions out of the Roman Catholic catechism they replied with answers which they had formerly learned from the Protestant; and a devout audience, invited to hear the proficiency of a class of supposed proselytes, were startled with a loud repetition of such sentiments as that the Pope is Anti-Christ, that Romish worship is idolatrous, and that the so-called Catholic Church is the mystic Babylon, and is spiritually named Egypt. Sometimes the converters tried to humour them in their jocularity, and to insinuate their dogmas upon their memory by stratagem; but they succeeded only in making themselves and their tuition ludicrous. In the house the boys burnt devotional books, broke images, made an uproar at meal-times, and mixed lumps of lard with fast-day fare. In church they talked or sang where the rubric enjoined silence, moved about from seat to seat, turned their backs on the semi-pagan altar, and stood or sat cross-legged when the congregation knelt. Besides which, there were constant escapes, leaping over high walls, and jumping out of windows; and even when recaptured, the young lion-hearts were not conquered.
Whether Abraham De Moivre made as noisy resistance we are not informed; but the result was the same. Being quite resolute, he received his discharge on the 15th April 1687, and was allowed to retire to England. And so he came to London, accompanied by his brother Daniel.[1]
At the age of twenty he found himself in the city, where he had immediately to begin a defensive war against starvation. He turned his favourite studies to account in order to earn a livelihood. He became a teacher of mathematics. He also gave lectures on natural philosophy, which, however, he discontinued, having not acquired any great command of the English language, and being, like many scientific men, inexpert in performing experiments before an assemblage of spectators.
But as an important epoch in the literature of the physical sciences, the date of his arrival in London was a happy one for him. In 1687 Isaac Newton had published the “Principia.” The fame of this great work soon reached the ears of De Moivre. Being written in Latin, it was no sealed book to him; and his classical and mathematical scholarship was such, that he thoroughly understood it, which few did. This led to his being admitted to the society of Newton and his learned friends. And although the renowned Englishman was his senior by a quarter of a century, he honoured the clever and accomplished refugee with his special regard. He thus obtained a gratifying position among English philosophers, which his own abilities enabled him to keep. It is said that in 1692 he had gained the friendship of Halley, and his intimacy with Newton began soon after that date.
The article in the “English Cyclopaedia of Biography” states that although De Moivre could appreciate such writings as Isaac Newton’s, there is scarcely a trace either of physical or geometrical investigations in his own writings, when his career of authorship began. His power lay in “pure mathematics of the kind now called analytical.” His first appearance in print was in the “Philosophical Transactions” for 1695; the subject of his paper was “The use and excellence of Newton’s Doctrine of Fluxions for the solution of geometric problems.” Another paper appeared in 1697 on the method for finding the root of an infinite equation. In this year, the thirtieth of his age, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Daniel De Moivre obtained a good position, but in w hat line we are not informed. In or before the year 1706 he was married to "Anne," and in the register of the French Church in West Street, on 16th January 1707, he appears as a father presenting his son, Daniel, for baptism; he is styled “Sieur Daniel De Moivre,”and the godfather is “Sieur Abraham De Moivre.” [A daughter, Anne, was baptized on 12th March 1708 (n.s.).]
Abraham De Moivre seems to have increased his reputation in a controversy with a Scottish author, Dr. George Cheyne, who settled in London in 1701. This medical gentleman having adopted a novel doctrine of fluxions, published a treatise in Latin against Newton and his admirers, including De Moivre. This was in 1703, and in the following year De Moivre published “Animadversiones in Geo. Chenoei Tractatum,” which was tolerably cutting. It drew out a still more cutting rejoinder from Cheyne, “Adversus Abr. De Moivre,” which being not mathematical, but per-
- ↑ I have ventured to say “1687” in spite of Haag’s “1688,” because our King James’ warrant “to our Attorney or Sollicitor-Generall” for the Naturalisation of Abraham and Daniel De Moivre was dated Whitehall, 16th December 1687, and the naturalization was granted at Westminster 5th January 1688 (new style).
