DEDICATORY LETTER, DEAR MISS GREGORY, The earlier Numbers of the Cambridge Mathematical Journal, of which your lamented brother was the first Editor, having been for some years out of print, many of the essays which he contributed to this valuable Periodical have become inaccessible to most mathematical readers. The intrinsic value of his articles, by which in a great degree a spirit of originality was awakened in the University of Cambridge at an era of peculiar stagnation in mathematical *The Cambridge Mathematical Journal, extending to Four Volumes, was succeeded by a New Series entitled The Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, consisting of Nine Volumes; and of a Third Series, The Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Six Volumes have already been published. invention, could not fail to recommend them permanently to those who delight in the history and the philosophy of abstract science. Animated by this conviction, I have, with your permission, gathered together in this Volume his contributions to the various Numbers of the Mathematical Journal, together with an Essay on the Foundations of Algebra, presented by him to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The photograph, taken from the excellent crayon drawing by Mr. Crawford of Edinburgh, with which you have enriched this volume, will be very interesting to those who have a personal recollection of your brother, and perhaps also to others. As the sketch, which recently served, under your supervision, as the basis of the crayon drawing, was taken when he was only eighteen years of age, the expression naturally strikes me as rather youthful, when I recall the features, so familiar to me, which were impressed on my memory some years later, when I had the happiness of being admitted among the number of his intimate friends. |