MISCEILAliTEOTJS. 61 



the formation of any the least idea of the scope and meaning of his works on 

 algebra. 



At the time when Peacock took his degree, the public mind of Cambridge was 

 stirred on the question of the University mathematics. The English school, follow- 

 ing Newton's notation of fluxions, had almost lost the power of reading the con- 

 tinental treatise. There were two undergraduates, Herschel and Peacock, who 

 were well read, in the foreign writers. There was a third, Babbage, who, without 

 the same depth of reading, had trained a rare genius for analysis in the same 

 school. A fourth was Maul (afterwards Judge), who might have been among the 

 first of mathematicians, if he had chosen that career. Woodhouse, an older man, 

 had opened the way by a treatise in 1803. The younger men determined to act 

 in concert, for the introduction of the continential mathematics- They formed 

 an Analytical Society, and published a volume of Memoirs in 1813. They trans- 

 lated the work of Lacroix on the Diiferential Calculus, and prepared a volume of 

 examples, of which Peacock compiled the larger part, in a manner which showed 

 very extraordinary reading for a man of his age. This translation, and these ex- 

 amples, carried the day : and Peacock, when he became Moderator in 181*7, com- 

 pleted the victory by introducing the modern language and notation into the public 

 examinations. His colleague did mt join him in the alteration ; and the 

 Moderators < if 1818 returned to the old system. Peacock was again Moderator in 

 1819 with a colleague of hid own cabal (Mr. Gwatkin), and from that year the 

 change was fully accepted. There are those who like to know the precise time 

 and manner of all things : let them stand informed that the official recognition of 

 the continental school of mathematicians at Cambridge dates from nine o'clock in 

 the morning of Monday, January 13, 1817, when Peacock put into the hands of 

 each candidate for honours a printed paper, the fourth question of which stands 

 thus:— 



" Find the integral of YT^*" 



Peacock became a tutor of the college, and gained a high reputation as a teacher 

 and as a guardian of his pupils. His temper was kind, his knowledge of the world, 

 and especially of the young world, was ample, and his manner was pleasant. 

 Some amusing peculiarities of idiom, brought from the north, and — to speak the 

 truth — a peculiar physiognomy, which would have been visited in vengeance upon 

 a disagreeable and donnish superior, were but additions to his popularity. He 

 had a strong, active, practical turn for administration, and college aff'airs prevented 

 him from making science his whole object, though he was always a student, not 

 only of mathematics, but of literature. In 1826 appeared in the Encyclopaedia 

 Metropolitana his article on the history of Arithmetic, the most learned essay on 

 the subject which exists. He Avas at the same time continually occupied with 

 thought on the nature and first principles of algebra. A syllubus of Trigonometry 

 in which he fixed — for Cambridge, at least — the character of the fundamental 

 forms, which had been fluctuating between the old and new, was a slight digres- 

 sion. We cannot undertake to describe in full what he did for algebra. That 

 science, like logic, ought to be purely formal : up to our own day it has been 

 troubled with apparent exceptions, arising from insufiicient amount of generality 



