MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY. 283 



guiding the Society off the rail, as it were, and getting it out 1865. 

 of the way in which the momentum of its members can be Inaugural 

 applied to move it. ... address - 



Our great aim is the cultivation of pure Mathematics, and 

 their most immediate applications. If we look at what takes 

 place around us, we stall find that we have no Mathematical 

 Society to look to as our guide. The Royal Society, it is true, 

 receives mathematical papers, but it cannot be called a Mathe- 

 matical Society. The Cambridge Philosophical Society seems 

 to fulfil more nearly the functions of a Mathematical Society, but 

 it is in an exceptional position. It is the Society of the place 

 which may be regarded as the centre of the Mathematical world ; 

 it is a Society in which almost all the members are able to relish 

 its highest discussions. But in London we have no Mathema- 

 tical Society at all. 



He had a few words for his old object of attack the 

 Cambridge examinations : 



The Cambridge examination is nothing but a hard trial of 

 what we must call problems since they call them so of the 

 Senior Wrangler that is to be of this present January, and the 

 Senior Wranglers of some three or four years ago. The whole 

 object seems to be to produce problems, or, as I should prefer to 

 call them, hard ten-minute conundrums. These problems, as 

 they are called, are necessarily obliged to be things of ten 

 minutes or a quarter of an hour. It is impossible in such an 

 examination to propose a matter that would take a competent 

 Mathematician two or three hours to solve, and for the con- 

 sideration of which it would be necessary for him to draw his 

 materials from different quarters, and see how he can put together 

 his previous knowledge so as to bring it to bear most effectually 

 on this particular subject. It is, I say, impossible that such a 

 problem as this should be set in these examinations. 



It must be one of our objects to introduce into our dis- 

 cussions something more like problems properly so called, and, 

 if possible, to keep ourselves from entertaining an undue n am- 

 ber of the questions just described. In some quarters the Mathe- 

 matics are looked at, I may say, almost entirely with reference 

 to their applications. These applications are not only physical 

 applications or commercial applications, which may be termed 

 external, but there are also what may be termed internal appli- 

 cations. Those very questions to which I have alluded already, 



