Sir Humphry Davy 117 



its existence. The stress was at once relieved by the large 

 addition of new members attracted by the engaging per- 

 sonality of the young lecturer. 



A significant light is shed on the small value then 

 attached by the English Universities to experimental science 

 by the fact that none of them ever publicly recognized 

 Davy's work. The only University honour he received was 

 the LL.D. degree from Trinity College, Dublin. 



Yet a great revival of scientific activity had already 

 begun at Cambridge, though at the time of Davy's death 

 it was mainly confined to the domain of pure mathematics. 

 It is sad to think how a spirit of loyalty to its greatest 

 ornament should have paralysed that great University for 

 almost a century, by compelling a rigid adherence to the 

 details of Newton's formal procedure, for it was almost 

 purely a question of nomenclature that delayed progress. 

 In using the method of " fluxions," which is identical in 

 its fundamental ideas with what we now call the Differential 

 Calculus, Newton denoted the rate of change of a quantity, 

 say u, depending on another quantity, say t, simply by 

 placing a dot over the u. If u be the length of path travelled 

 over by a point, and t the time, u would represent the 

 velocity. Leibnitz, starting from the idea of infinitely small 

 quantities, placed a d before the symbol of the variable 

 quantity; dt would be an indefinitely small time, and dujdt 

 would represent the velocity. From the purely philosophic 

 point of view there is much to be said for Newton's notation, 

 but as an instrument of research, that introduced by Leib- 

 nitz had considerable advantages, more especially in the 

 inverse process of integration. When Cambridge began to 

 wake up, Charles Babbage (1792-1871) was among those 

 who helped to introduce the methods which had been so 

 successful in the hands of the great French mathematicians 

 of the eighteenth century. A special society the Analy- 

 tical Society having been formed for the purpose, Babbage 

 neatly expressed the objects of the society as " advocating 

 the principles of pure ' de-ism ' for the ' do-age ' of the 

 University." 



The founder of the new school was Robert Woodhouse 

 (1773-1827), Lucasian Professor of Mathematics between 



