lucky and most unpopular members, Thompson left the civil service, and was nominated to a cavalry command in the revolted provinces of America. But the War of Independence was practically at an end, and in 1783 he finally quitted active service, with the rank and half-pay of a lieutenant-colonel. He now formed the design of joining the Austrian army, for the purpose of campaigning against the Turks, and so crossed over from Dover to Calais with Gibbon, who, writing to his friend Lord Sheffield, calls his fellow-passenger "Mr Secretary-Colonel-Admiral-Philosopher Thompson." At Strasburg he was introduced to Prince Maximilian, afterwards elector of Bavaria, and was by him invited to enter the civil and military service of that state. Having obtained the leave of the British Government to accept the prince's offer, he received the honour of knighthood from George III., and during eleven years he remained at Munich as minister of war, minister of police, and grand chamberlain to the elector. His political and courtly employments, however, did not absorb all his time, and he contributed during his stay in Bavaria a number of papers to the Philosophical Transactions. But that he was sufficiently alert as the principal adviser of the elector the results of his labours in that capacity amply prove. He reorganized the Bavarian army; he suppressed mendicity and found employment for the poor; and he immensely improved the condition of the industrial classes throughout the country by providing them with work and instructing them in the practice of domestic economy. Of the prompt and the business-like manner in which he was wont to carry his plans into execution a single example may serve as an illustration. The multitude of beggars in Bavaria had long been a public nuisance and danger. In one day Thompson caused no fewer than 2600 of these outcasts and depredators in Munich and its suburbs alone to be arrested by military patrols, and transferred by them to an industrial establishment which he had prepared for their reception. In this institution they were both housed and fed, and they not only supported themselves by their labours but earned a surplus for the benefit of the electoral revenues. The principle on which their treatment proceeded is stated by Thompson in the following memorable words:—"To make vicious and abandoned people happy," he says, "it has generally been supposed necessary first to make them virtuous. But why not reverse this order? Why not make them first happy, and then virtuous?" In 1791 he was created a count of the Holy Roman Empire, and chose his title of Rumford from the name as it then was of the American township to which his wife's family belonged. In 1795 he visited England, one incident of his journey being the loss of all his private papers, including the materials for an autobiography, which were contained in a box stolen from off his postchaise in St Paul's Churchyard. During his residence in London he applied himself to the discovery of methods for curing smoky chimneys and the contrivance of improvements in the construction of fireplaces. But he was quickly recalled to Bavaria, Munich being threatened at once by an Austrian and a French army. The elector fled from his capital, and it was entirely owing to Rumford's energy and tact that a hostile occupation of the city was prevented. It was now proposed that he should be accredited as Bavarian ambassador in London; but the circumstance that he was a British subject presented an insurmountable obstacle. He, however, again came to England, and remained there in a private station for several years. In 1799 he, in conjunction with Sir Joseph Banks, projected the establishment of the Royal Institution, which received its charter of incorporation from George III. in 1800. Rumford himself selected Sir Humphry Davy as the first scientific lecturer there. Until 1804, when he definitively settled in France, Rumford lived at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, or at a house which he rented at Brompton, where he passed his time in the steady pursuit of those researches relating to heat and light and the economy of fuel on which his scientific fame is principally based. He then established himself in Paris, and married (his first wife having been dead for many years) as his second wife the wealthy widow of Lavoisier, the celebrated chemist. With this lady he led an extremely uncomfortable life, till at last they agreed to separate. Rumford took up his residence at Auteuil, where he died suddenly in 1814, in the sixty-second year of his age.
He was the founder and the first recipient of the Rumford medal of the London Royal Society. He was also the founder of the Rumford medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Rumford professorship in Harvard university. His complete works were published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at Boston in 1872; and a full and extremely interesting memoir of the author which was issued with them was republished in London by Messrs Macmillan in 1876.(f. dr.)
THOMPSON, Thomas Peronnet (1783–1869), mathematician and political writer, was born at Hull in 1783. He was educated at the Hull grammar school, and in October 1798 entered Queens College, Cambridge. He entered the navy as midshipman in the "Isis" in 1803, but in 1806 exchanged to the army. Through his acquaintance with Wilberforce, he was appointed governor of Sierra Leone in 1808, but was recalled on account of his hostility to the slave trade. In 1812-he returned to his military duties, and, after serving in the south of France, was in 1815 attached as Arabic interpreter to an expedition against the Wahhabees of the Persian Gulf, with whom he negotiated a treaty (dated January 1820) in which the slave trade was for the first time declared piracy. He was promoted major in 1825, lieutenant-colonel in 1829, and major-general in 1854. He entered parliament as member for Hull in 1835, and afterwards sat for Bradford. He took a prominent part in the corn-law agitation, his Catechism of the Corn Laws (1827) being by far the most effective pamphlet published on the subject. He was joint-editor of the Westminster Review, to which he contributed a large number of articles, republished in 1824 in six volumes, under the title Exercises, Political and Others. His mathematical publications were of a somewhat eccentric kind. He published a Theory of Parallels (1844), and was also the author of Geometry without Axioms, in which he endeavoured to "get rid" of axioms and postulates. His new Theory of Just Intonation (1850) is, however, a contribution of great value to the science of musical acoustics, and has gone through many editions. It may be said to form the basis of the tonic sol-fa system of music. He died 6th October 1869.
