Vll 



ordinary abilities; but they were not indicated by his personal 

 Learing, and the retiring modesty of his disposition prevented 

 liiin from ever alluding to the honours he had won at Cambridge. 

 He had one of the most unsophisticated minds I have ever 

 known ; jokes, and the badinage of the pupil-room, seemed to be 

 delightful novelties to him, and his face beamed with amusement 

 as he listened to them without taking much part in the conversa- 

 tion, being content to devote his time assiduously to work which 

 I suspect was not altogether congenial to his taste " 



But if the modest, almost shy, man did not display his honours, he 

 could not conceal his powers ; and very soon his clearness of head, 

 his almost intuitive grasp of the principles of any subject that came 

 before him, his capacity for work and his power of concentration, 

 made him a favourite pupil. He was called to the Bar on 3rd May, 

 1849, and thereafter he had no occasion to wait for business. Mr. 

 Christie was always ready to supply him with at least as much con- 

 veyancing work as he was willing to undertake : but no advice, no 

 encouragement, no opening however favourable, least of all any wish 

 for fame or fortune, could tempt him to subside into a large practice. 

 He restricted himself to " devilling " for Mr. Christie, and he limited 

 the amount of work he would undertake in this way, always refusing 

 work that came to him at first hand. There is no doubt that, had he 

 remained at the Bar and devoted himself to its business, he could 

 have made a great legal reputation and a substantial fortune : even 

 as it was, some of his drafts* have been made to serve as models. 

 Bat the spirit of research possessed him ; it was not merely will but 

 an irresistible impulse that made the pursuit of mathematics, not the 

 practice of law, his chief desire. To achieve this desire, he reserved 

 with jealous care a due portion of his time; and he regarded his 

 legal occupations mainly as the means of providing a livelihood. 



He remained at the Bar for fourteen years. Between two and 

 three hundred papers are the mathematical outcome of that period ; 

 and they include some of the most brilliant of his discoveries. Among 

 these papers are to be found the majority of his famous memoirs on 

 quantics (particularly the sixth memoir, in which he develops his 

 theory of geometry and shows that all geometry can be made entirely 

 descriptive), his work upon matrices, numerous contributions to the 

 theory of symmetric functions of the roots' of an equation, the 

 elaborate calculations connected with the development of functions 

 arising in the planetary and the lunar theories, and his valuable 

 reports on theoretical dynamics. The enormous range over which 



* In Davidson's 'Precedents and Forms in Conveyancing' (third edition, 1873), 

 vol. 3, Part II, p. 1067, the author adds a footnote, calling "attention to th* 

 remarkable skill exhibited in [a] settlement, the work of Mr. Arthur Cayley." 



