A Cyclopaedia of Canadian Biography: Being Chiefly Men of the Time: A Collection of Persons Distinguished in Professional and Political Life, Leaders in the Commerce and Industry of Canada, and Successful Pioneers
History
A Cyclopaedia of Canadian Biography: Being Chiefly Men of the Time: A Collection of Persons Distinguished in Professional and Political Life, Leaders in the Commerce and Industry of Canada, and Successful Pioneers
And the _Quebec Mercury_ of the 10th July, 1878, has the following in
relation to a second letter from the same source: “It will be remembered
that in February, 1877, Mr. Baillairgé received an official letter from
the Minister of Public Instruction, of St. Petersburg, Russia, informing
him that his new system of mensuration had been adopted in all the
primary and medium schools of that vast empire. After a lapse of
eighteen months, the system having been found to work well, Mr.
Baillairgé has received an additional testimonial from the same source,
informing him that the system is to be applied in all the polytechnic
schools of the Russian empire.” Mr. Baillairgé has since that time given
occasional lectures in both languages on industrial art and design, and
on other interesting and instructive topics, and is now engaged on a
dictionary or dictionaries of the consonances of both the French and
English languages. In 1866 he wrote his treatise on geometry and
trigonometry, plane and spherical, with mathematical tables—a volume of
some 900 pages octavo, and has since edited several works and pamphlets
on like subjects. In his work on geometry, which, by the way, is written
in the French language, Mr. Baillairgé has, by a process explained in
the preface, reduced to fully half their number the two hundred and odd
propositions of the first six books of Euclid, while deducing and
retaining all the conclusions arrived at by the great geometer. Mr.
Baillairgé, moreover, shows the practical use and adaptation of problems
and theorems which might otherwise appear to be of doubtful utility, as
of the ratio between the tangent, whole secant, and part of the secant
without the circle, in the laying out of railroad and other curves
running through given points, and numerous other examples. His treatment
of spherics and of the affections of the sides and angles is, in many
respects, novel, and more easy of apprehension by the general student.
In a note at foot of page 330, Mr. Baillairgé shows the fallacy of
Thorpe’s pretended solution of the trisection of an angle, at which the
poor man had laboured for thirty-four years, and takes the then
government to task for granting Mr. Thorpe a patent for the discovery.
In February, 1874, he visited Europe, and it was on the 15th of March of
that year that he received his first laurels at the “Grand Conservatoire
National des Arts et Métiers,” Paris. Some of Mr. Baillairgé’s annual
reports on civic affairs are very interesting and instructive; that of
1878, on “The Municipal Situation,” is particularly worthy of perusal.
His report of 1872 was more especially sought after by almost every city
engineer in Canada and the United States, on account of the varied
information it conveyed. It may also be remembered, as illustrative of
the versatility of his talent and of his humouristic turn of mind, that
a comedy, “Le Diable Devenu Cuisinier,” written by him in the French
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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