Gauss was the son of a bricklayer, and owed his education to the reigning duke. Ramanujan’s father was indeed accountant to a cloth merchant, but it may be doubted whether the position of an Indian accountant in the late nineteenth century was financially very much preferable to that of a German bricklayer in the late eighteenth. At any rate when Ramanujan, a married man of twenty-five, wrote his first letter to Professor Hardy enclosing statements of some of the results he had obtained in mathematics, he himself was employed as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office of Madras and earning a salary of £20 a year. Ramanujan lived in a more democratic age than Gauss, so there was no reigning duke for him. Fortunate then that there were Indian and British mathematicians who were interested and impressed, and an able and sympathetic civil servant as chairman of the Madras Port authority.