Memoir of PEC

Garrett, Philip C. 1887. Memoir of Pliny Earle Chase. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 24(126): 287-295. [JSTOR]

Edward Everett Hale, who was a Harvard classmate, informs that he was "distinguished for scholarship, especially for mathematical scholarship, [|] in his class at Cambridge. He was one of a special advanced section in mathematics, of which no member had had to take a lesson a second time. They were therefore so much in advance of the great body of the class that, at the end of the mathematical course, they had the advantage of special instruction from Prof. Peirce in higher mathematics. He was interested in all branches of physics. I remember him especially," writes Mr. Hale, "as one of eight observers who made some of the first observations which are on record of the shooting stars." (Garrett 1887: 287-288)

Pliny Earle Chase (1820-1886) had been taught by Benjamin Peirce.

He had a singularly versatile mind, and a comprehensive and richly furnished memory. His writings included a wide range of subjects, upon each of which he displayed much erudition, and they were full of suggestiveness. It is seldom that a like capacity is found in one mind, both as a linguist and as a mathematician. He read with the help of dictionaries, and was more or less familiar with one hundred and twenty-three languages and dialects, and claimed thorough acquaintance with thirty of them. His knowledge of these was not profound, nor was it marked by the accuracy, in pronunciation and otherwise, which familiar conversation requires. Yet his attainments as a linguist afford a remarkable indication of the scope of his mind and the extent of his memory, and therefore throw an important light upon our estimate of the value of his deeper and more characteristic productions. Occasional contributions to the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society were made on subjects in Comparative Philology, as the paper "On Radical Etymology," that on the "Mathematical Probability of Accidental Linguistic Resemblances," on "Sanskrit and English Roots and Analogues," on the "Comparative Etymology of the Yoruba Language," and others. (Garrett 1887: 291)

"Suggestiveness" is exact.

Of over 150 papers contributed by him to various learned bodies, most of them to this Society, not more than one tenth were philological, and the remainder mostly in meteorology, cosmics and physics. Many of these were fragmentary, - studies, as it were, of great themes, - and in undigested groups; they were unfinished, like Michael Angelo's marble groups, and needed the master's hand to give them the perfect expression intended. As he grew older, they took more and more a cosmical direction, and his mind struggled to demonstrate from the harmonies of the universe, as the geologist does from the marvelous narrative of the rocks, a cosmical evolution. Going back to the very sources of development with daring genius, he sought, through proofs of the "Quantitative equivalence of the different forms of force which we call light, heat, electricity, chemical affinity, and gravitation," and original theories of nodal accumulation, the truth of which time may affirm, to establish a common law that "All physical phenomena are due to an Omnipotent Power, acting in ways which may be represented by harmonic or cyclical undulations in an elastic medium." (Garrett 1887: 291)

It is difficult not to jump to the conclusion that Chase was a dedicated pythagorean.

His methods of thinking were swift, and led him to undemonstrated skips in his reasoning which made it difficult to follow him. In the ordinary processes of addition, he footed up columns of eight or ten numbers, extending into trillions, instantaneously, setting down the result from left to right, ending with the units. A certain instinctive or intuitive faculty pervaded his demonstrations, interrupting their purely mathematical character, and making many mathematicians and physicists plausibly skeptical as to the value of his theories. (Garrett 1887: 292)

There might be such a thing as being too brilliant.

Prof. Kirkwood writes: "The just value of his contributions to science cannot at once be determined. It must be said, however, that his hypothetical conclusions were so often in close agreement with well-known facts, as to leave the impression that his theories must have a foundation in truth." Prof. Herschell, referring to his paper on "The Results of Wave Interference," bears this testimony: "From a direction of research probably as distant and distinct as possible from the late Prof. Chase's, at least in its origin, I have reached results which the contents in this case, of Prof. Chase's papers, confirm and corroborate so amazingly, that all question of the real validity of views, however incongruous they may perhaps be to each other in particulars, by which identical results of such surprising character have been arrived at by us both, in perfect independence, is banished completely and forever from my mind. Prof. Chase's writings and discoveries will constantly gain in note and consequence by wider and longer consideration and perusal; and they will surely never cease to have leading uses for consultation and for purposes of instructive study, among those who aim and strive to unmask more laws of energy's unitary operations, if possible as prominent and predominating as those which his discoveries have disclosed." (Garrett 1887: 292)

Sadly, at least his philosophical achievements were not followed up. Their congruence with Peirce's semiotics might ultimately do it.