;

XX Biographical Notice

width and alertness of scientific interest in Cambridge at this time ;

papers
of George Green were read at the Society in 1832, 1833, 1837 and 1839
James Gumming, whose chemical lectures Sylvester attended, Sir John
Herschel, De Morgan, and Whewell are aiiiong the early contributors.
Sir John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philo-
sophy is dated 1831. The third meeting of the British Association was in
Cambridge, on 24 June 1833. Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences
was published at Cambridge in 1837, the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences
in 1840. But we find* that in 1818 Sedgwick gave up his assistant tutor-
ship, whose duties were mainly those of teaching the mathematical students
of Trinity College, on the ground that "as far as the improvement of the
mind is considered, I am at this moment doing nothing....! am... very sensibly
approximating to that state of fatuity to which we must all come if we
remain here long enough." This was before Sylvester's student time, and
while mathematics at Cambridge was still suffering, partly from the long
consequences of the controversy in regard to Leibniz and Newton, and more
immediately from the loss of communication with the mathematicians of
the Continent due to the war. Yet Sir John Herschelf, writing in 1833,
feels compelled to speak very decidedly of the long-subsisting superiority of
foreign mathematics to our own, as he phrases it, and there seems to be no
doubt that mathematics, as distinct from physics, was then at a very low ebb
in Cambridge, notwithstanding the success of the struggle, about a quarter
of a century before, to introduce the analytical methods then in use on the
Continent. C. Babbage, in his amusing Passages from the Life of a Philo-
sopher, describes how he went (about 1812) to his public tutor to ask the

solution of one of his mathematical difficulties and received the answer that
it would not be asked in the Senate House, and was of no sort of con-
sequence, with the advice to get up the earlier subjects of the university
studies and how, after two further attempts and similar replies from other
;

teachers, he acquired a distaste for the routine of the place. His connexion
with the translation of Lacroix's Elementary Differential Calculus (1816), and
his association with George Peacock, Sir John Herschel and others in the
Analytical Society, is wellknown the title proposed by him for a volume
;

of their Transactions, " The principles of pure D-ism in opposition to the

Dot-age of the University," has often been quoted.
In addition to the better known accounts, there is an echo of what is
usually said about Cambridge in this connexion in an Eloge on Sir John
Herschel, read at the Royal Astronomical Society, 9 February 1872, by a
writer who compares the work of Lagrange on the theory of equations with
that of Waring, who was born in the same year, and was Senior Wrangler
at Cambridge in 1757. We may add to this the bare titles of two continental
* Life of Adam Sedgwick, by J. W. Clark, i, p. 154.

t Collected Essays, Longmans, 1857, pp. SO — 39.