Ill 



this time and published not long afterwards by an acquaintance,* who 

 says that : 



" As an undergraduate he had generally the reputation of a 

 mere mathematician, which did him great injustice, for he was 

 really a man of much varied information, and that on some sub- 

 jects the very opposite of scientific for instance, he was well up 

 in all the current novels, an uncommon thing at Cambridge where 

 novel-reading is not one of the popular weaknesses." 



Novel-readers are more frequent in Cambridge now than they 

 appear to have been in 1842, and Cayley in his later days avoided 

 reading some of the modern novels; but it is worth noting, as will 

 subsequently be seen more in detail, that he had this " popular weak- 

 ness " all his life, 



He was admitted a scholar of the College on 1st May, 1840, winning 

 his scholarship at the earliest time when it was possible to do so : 

 and he secured a first class in each of the annual examinations of the 

 College. No record of marks for the first and the second years is 

 given in the Trinity Head Examiner's Book ; but in the third year 

 the marks are given and, as he then scored more than twice the marks 

 of the second candidate, the Head Examiner separated him from the 

 rest of the first class by drawing a line under his name. This presage 

 of his powers was confirmed in the following year, 1842, when he 

 graduated as Senior Wrangler ; the Examiners were so definitely 

 satisfied that he was first as to dispense in his case with the viva 

 voce tests which at that time were a customary part of the Tripos. 

 And in due course the first Smith's Prize was awarded to him in the 

 succeeding examination. 



Cayley's own " year " at Trinity was a distinguished one ; for, in 

 addition to himself, it contained Mr. (now the Right Honourable) 

 George Denman, for many years a Judge of the High Court of Justice, 

 and Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, one of the foremost of Latin 

 Scholars of any period. And the distinction of Cayley's contempo- 

 raries in neighbouring years is marked : it is impossible to avoid 

 noticing the names of some of the graduates in the Mathematical 

 Tripos about that time. Sylvester and Green (second and fourth 

 wranglers respectively in 1837), Leslie Ellis (senior in 1840), Stokes 

 (senior in 1841), Cayley (senior in 1842), Adams (senior in 1843), 

 Thomson now Lord Kelvin (second in 1845), constitute an extra- 



* Bristed, ' Five Years in an English University ' (second edition, 1852), p. 95. 



Tt may be added that Cayley declared the story about him in the tripos, recorded 

 by Bristed, to be quite apocryphal. 



So also was another story, belonging to a later part of his life, according to 

 which he is reported to have said that " the object of law was to say a thing in the 

 greatest number of words, and of mathematics to say it in the fewest": this view, 

 and the possibility of his ever having held it, he repudiated entirely. 



6 2 



