Word Finder - memoir

definition

An autobiography; a book describing the personal experiences of an author.

example

When I retire, I'm going to write my memoirs.

definition

A biography; a book describing the experiences of a subject from personal knowledge of the subject or from sources with personal knowledge of the subject.

example

James wrote a memoir of his grandmother shortly after she passed away.

definition

Any form of narrative describing the personal experiences of a writer.

A memoir of his life by his eldest son appeared in 1834.

Stevenson's well-known Memoir is a sympathetic tribute to his ability and character.

His memoir of his friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin was published soon after his departure.

See The Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel, by Mrs John Herschel (1876).

The first part of this memoir, which was probably compiled about 670, deals with the saint's work in Meath, the second with his activity in Connaught.

But Merrem, who subsequently communicated to the Academy of Berlin a more detailed memoir on the " flat-breasted " birds, 3 was careful not here to rest his divisions on the presence or absence of their sternal character alone.

See Autobiography of Thomas Guthrie, D.D., and Memoir, by his sons (2 vols., London, 1874-1875).

A new form of condenser was tested on the small engine employed, and the results it yielded formed the starting-point of a series of investigations which were aided by a special grant from the Royal Society, and were described in an elaborate memoir presented to it on the 13th of December 1860.

In 1855 he published a memoir of Thomas Young, and about the same time there appeared Young's collected works in three volumes, for the first two of which Peacock was responsible.

Of his astronomical writings during this period the most important are his investigation of the mass of Jupiter, his report to the British Association on the progress of astronomy during the 19th century, and his memoir On an Inequality of Long Period in the Motions of the Earth and Venus.

In his Memoir, indeed, Gibbon denies that he had ever enlisted with the Whigs.

Immediately after taking his degree, he read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society a very novel memoir, " On the Transformation of Surfaces by Bending."

About the same time appeared his elaborate memoir, " On Faraday's Lines of Force," in which he gave the first indication of some of those extraordinary electrical investigations which culminated in the greatest work of his life.

Miscellanies, preceded by a full Memoir by the Editor.

The greatest benefit conferred by this memoir is probably that it stimulated the efforts, presently to be mentioned, of one of his pupils, and that it brought more distinctly into sight that other factor, originally discovered by Merrem, of which it now clearly became the duty of systematizers to take cognizance.

He wrote a biographical memoir for an edition of his father's writings, which was published in 187 r.

The various comparisons previously made between the structure of Limulus and the Eurypterines on the one hand, and that of a typical Arachnid, such as Scorpio, on the other, had been vitiated by erroneous notions as to the origin of the nerves supplying the anterior appendages of Limulus (which were finally removed by Alphonse Milne-Edwards in his beautiful memoir (6) on the structure of that animal), and secondly by the erroneous identification of the double sternal plates of Limulus, called " chilaria," by Owen, with a pair of appendages (7).

The facts detailed in the original memoir led to the conclusion that argon was an element or a mixture of elements, but the question between these alternatives was left open.

In a memoir presented to the Academy in 1777, but not published till 1782, he assigned to dephlogisticated air the name oxygen, or "acidproducer," on the supposition that all acids were formed by its union with a simple, usually non-metallic, body; and having verified this notion for phosphorus, sulphur, charcoal, &c., and even extended it to the vegetable acids, he naturally asked himself what was formed by the combustion of "inflammable air" (hydrogen).

There have been several later issues; one in two volumes, with a memoir (Bohn, 1845).

A memoir of his life by Johanna Schopenhauer, mother of the philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, appeared in 1810, and a complete edition of his works in 1829.

The first, for a memoir on the construction of a clepsydra for measuring time exactly at sea, he gained at the age of twenty-four; the second, for one on the physical cause of the inclination of the planetary orbits, he divided with his father; and the third, for a communication on the tides, he shared with Euler, Colin Maclaurin and another competitor.

Among his principal publications are An Examination of Ferrier's "Knowing and Being," and the Scottish Philosophy - (a work which gave him the reputation of being an independent Hamiltonian in philosophy); Memoir of John Brown, D.D.

In addition to his interest in politics and public improvements, he devoted much study to the natural sciences; among his published works are a Memoir on the Antiquities of Western New York (1818), and Letters on the Natural History and Internal Resources of New York (1822).

His memoir (1775) on the rotatory motion of a body contains (as the author was aware) conclusions at variance with those arrived at by Jean le Rond, d'Alembert and Leonhard Euler in their researches on the same subject.

But Landen's capital discovery is that of the theorem known by his name (obtained in its complete form in the memoir of 1775, and reproduced in the first volume of the Mathematical Memoirs) for the expression of the arc of an hyperbola in terms of two elliptic arcs.

In the memoir cited above Regnault gives an account of determinations of the velocity in air in pipes of great length and of diameters ranging from o 108 metres to i i metres.

From subsidiary experiments (for which the original memoir must be consulted) the pressure variations within the resonator could be calculated from the movements of the plate.

See Memorial of Bishop Hobart, containing a Memoir (New York, 1831); John McVickar, The Early Life and Professional Years of Bishop Hobart (New York, 1834), and The Closing Years of Bishop Hobart (New York, 1836).

In 1849 he presented to the Royal Society a memoir which, together with a history of the subject, contained details of a long series of determinations, the result of which was 77 2.

Geoffroy, in a memoir presented to the Royal Academy at Paris, supported the views of Grew and others as to the sexes of plants.

See Memoir by his daughter, prefixed to the posthumous third edition of_Marco Polo (1903)..

In 1782 he received the prize from the Berlin Academy for his Dissertation sur la question de balistique," a memoir relating to the paths of projectiles in resisting media.

Gauss in his memoir Disquisitiones generales circa series infcnitas (1816), but in a very different manner.

In 1788 Legendre published a memoir on double integrals, and in 1809 one on definite integrals.

The symbol (alp) which is known as Legendre's symbol, and denotes the positive or negative unit which is the remainder when au s (-1) is divided by a prime number p, does not appear in this memoir, but was first used in the Essai sur la theorie des nombres.

In this memoir also the function which is now called the potential was, at the suggestion of Laplace, first introduced.

Legendre's second memoir was communicated to the Academie in 1784, and relates to the conditions of equilibrium of a mass of rotating fluid in the form of a figure of revolution which does not deviate much from a sphere.

The third memoir relates to Laplace's theorem respecting confocal ellipsoids.

Legendre was also the author of a memoir upon triangles drawn upon a spheroid.

He published a memoir on the integration of partial differential equations and a few others, which have not been noticed above, but they relate to subjects with which his name is not especially associated.

The treatise which laid the foundation for all subsequent invertebrate palaeontology was his memoir, Sur les fossiles des environs de Paris..

Of the amiable personal character and the placid life of Isaac D'Israeli a charming picture is to be found in the brief memoir prefixed to the 1849 edition of Curiosities of Literature, by his son Lord Beaconsfield.

The standard edition with memoir and notes by Elliott Coues was published in three volumes in New York in 1895.

His abilities were shown in an Eloge de Charles VII., which was crowned by the Academie de Nimes in 1820, and a memoir on Les Institutions de Saint Louis, which in 1821 was crowned by the Academic des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres.

A memoir of his life by the Rev. Arundell Blount Whatton, prefixed to a translation of the Venus in sole visa, appeared at London in 1859.

Cooper's other works are The Memorials of Cambridge, (1858-1866) and a Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby (1874).

His assumed memoir was printed for English readers in 1597 by William Ponsonby under the title of a Historie of the Great Emperor Tamerlan, drawn from the ancient monuments by Messire Jean du Bec, Abbot of Mortimer; and another version of the same book is to be found in the Histoire du Grand Tamerlan, by De Sainctyon, published at Amsterdam in 1678.

Much of the material was incorporated by Bishop Challoner in his Memoir of Missionary Priests (1741), and the MS. is now in the Public Record Office in Brussels.

Vaughan Thompson, Zoological Researches (Cork, 1830); memoir iv., " On the Cirripedes or Barnacles, demonstrating their deceptive character."