The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at Clermont-Ferrand, in France, 1623. Died in Paris, 1662. Aged 39.] Of a genius so rare as to seem supernatural. In tender years the boy, debarred from mathematical books, with charcoal, on the wall of a garret, worked out for himself problems answering to nearly the first book of Euclid--without definitions or terms,--calling a circle a round, and a right line a score. Whilst still young, he was a discoverer in physics. The rise of water in pumps, and of quicksilver in the barometer, had, till his time, been ascribed by the philosophers to the “horror of Nature for a vacuum.” He guessed that the cause was the pressure of the atmosphere, and verified his conjecture by carrying the barometer up a mountain. He saw, agreeably to his expectation, that as by the ascent the pressure gradually diminished, the quicksilver as gradually fell. He had a subtle and profound metaphysical intellect, with great power to express abstruse thoughts clearly and precisely. His temperament was melancholy. A singular hallucination hung by him--without otherwise disturbing the sound use of his faculties--that at his side a visible gulph was ever yawning. The melancholy took a deeper hue as he advanced towards the close of his brief life. He became religiously austere, and subjected himself to personal mortification and trials, under which elasticity and health gave way. Yet the pious philosopher was not without the lighter qualities of the mind. His celebrated “Provincial Letters,” written in defence of the doctrines of the Abbey of Port Royal, against the Jesuits, are bright with the keenest satire. Pascal was a great mathematician, a true philosopher, and one of the purest of men.