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dae course graduated as Doctor of Diyinity. He accepted no College 

 living, however, or special cure of souls — not from any want of appre- 

 tiation of the importance of the ministerial office, or doubt of his own 

 aptitude for its exercise, but from a conscientious persuasion that his 

 true sphere of utility would be found in the entire devotion of his 

 powers to the furtherance of the objects of the University as a place of 

 education, and to the improvement of its system of instruction in those 

 great branches of mental culture in which it was beginning to be felt 

 at that epoch that such improvement was not only possible, but largely 

 needed. Such prospects we have seen amply realized ; but it should 

 not be forgotten for the credit of that illustrious establishment, that 

 the movement in advance then making originated within itself, and was 

 in no way forced upon it by any pressure from without. Thence- 

 forward, then, his career may be considered as identified with the great 

 cause of University improvement, and in a larger and more expansive 

 point of view with that of philosophical, moral, and religious culture in 

 the widest and best acceptation of the words. 



During the period when he was pursuing his studies at Cambridge, 

 the mathematical department of the University curriculum was in what 

 might be called a transitional state. A perception had begun to be 

 entertained of the absolute necessity of including within its range a 

 knowledge of those powerful methods of investigation so familiar to the 

 Continental mathematicians, but which could hardly be said to be 

 known in England, and which at Cambridge had by some even been 

 regarded with dislike, as innovational. In this latter feeling, in common 

 with most of its younger members, he was far from participating, but 

 on the contrary was only desirous to forward the movement which he 

 saw commencing. 



About the period when he entered on his tutorial duties, a very 

 general sense had come to be entertained of this necessity ; but a great 

 obstacle to the introduction of an improved course of mathematical 

 reading existed in the absence of elementary works in our own lan- 

 guage adapted for the purpose of university teaching, in which the 

 principles of the analytical methods as applied to physical subjects 

 were exhibited, and a yet grea,ter in the utterly unphilosophical and 

 inadequate mode of treatment in what were termed "the branches" 

 current in the University. : The primary difficulty had been removed 

 by the translation by Peacock and his coadjutors of the treatise of 

 Lacroix on the difi'erential and integral calculus published in 1816, and 

 followed by a copious collection of examples illustrative of its applica- 

 tion to problems of pure mathematics and the theory of curves in 1820. 

 But the want of readable elementary works in all the branches, and 

 especially in that of dynamics, such, as might, as it were, break the 

 abruptness of the transition, and bridge over the interval between the 

 modes of treatment of that subject "in the ' Principia ' of Newton and 



