One of the difficulties, which the Examiners for the Mathematical Tripos have to contend against, is the tendency on the part of the Candidates to devote their time to learning certain pieces of book-work, which are likely to be set, instead of endeavouring to acquire an accurate and thorough knowledge of the fundamental facts and principles of the subjects, which they take up; and well-selected examples and problems illustrating the book-work are of great assistance to an examiner, in enabling him to discriminate between candidates, who have acquired a perfunctory knowledge of a subject, and those who have endeavoured to master it. But it would be a fallacy to imagine, that the utility of examples and problems is exclusively confined to the particular examination in which they are set; or that the practical value of a problem is to be estimated solely by the scientific value of the result, which it embodies. The existence of a large collection of examples and problems, is of great assistance to future generations of students, in enabling them to grasp the fundamental principles of a subject, and to acquire facility in the application of mathematical analysis to physics; and the severe course of training, which the University of Cambridge extracts from students of the higher branches of Mathematics, is of inestimable benefit to Science, in producing a body of men, who are thoroughly conversant with dynamical principles, and are able to employ with ease the more recondite processes of mathematical analysis.

Holyport is a hamlet in the parish of Bray, 1 mile south-south-west from Bray and 2 miles south from Maidenhead; it contains a Wesleyan chapel. ... Fledborough Hall, the seat of Alfred Barnard Basset, esq. F.R.S. is built on the site of an old house, called Bourne Bridge Lodge, which formerly belonged to Sir Robert Sidney kt.; the present house is named after the manor of Fledborough in Nottinghamshire.

From 1883 onwards Basset produced a succession of papers on applied mathematics, mainly on subjects suggested by current discussions. The 'classical' hydrodynamics had at that time a great fascination for a number of rising mathematicians, and Basset's own contributions in this kind to the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the London Mathematical Society, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London were of distinct merit. Among the numerous subjects which he treated we may mention the equilibrium of revolving fluids, and the theorems of Dirichlet and Dedekind, the interest in which had been revived by Bryan, Greenhill, and Love. At a later stage he attacked the theory of elastic plates and shells, which was then a matter of controversy, and was led to recognise independently the true explanation of a rather serious difficulty. Mention should also be made of his work on viscosity, and in particular on Boussinesq's problem of the variable slow motion of a sphere in a viscous liquid. These are only a few items out of the long list which appears in the Royal Society's catalogue.

The only feasible scheme seems to be the publication of a digest of papers by the co-operation of the various scientific societies; and, if thought desirable, papers published in foreign countries might also be included. In order to prepare the way for such a digest, I should strongly recommend that, in future, all societies should follow the example of the Incorporated Society for Law Reporting, and require authors to append a head-note to their papers, briefly setting forth the object of the investigation. Every three of four years the titles and head-notes of all papers relating to each separate branch of science should be copied out and arranged in proper order, and a series of digests of each separate branch of science should be published. Mathematicians would thus be enabled to purchase the mathematical digests a, and the chemists the chemical one. They would thereby be in a position to find out at a glance what papers have been published on their own special subjects during that period.

This work is a classic and a model of compact analysis and clear writing. The book was still in use as a text at Cambridge in the first decade of the present century. Although it refers to the state of the science as it existed in the interval 1884-1888, the book is still useful as a work of reference to many matters which by then had assumed a definitive form.

... a treatise on physical optics, another of his favourite subjects, to which he devoted immense pains, but which scarcely met with the recognition which it undoubtedly deserved.

The present work originated in certain notes, made about twenty-five years ago, upon the properties of some of the best-known higher plane curves ...

The earlier chapters of the book mainly reproduce some of the results contained in the first half of Salmon's 'Higher Plane Curves'; the methods of obtaining these results are novel. The treatment of Plücker's equations is specially striking, and equally unsatisfactory; the author would, in fact, have done better to have omitted his first four chapters and given a reference to Salmon's work in the preface. ... The whole question of plane cubics and quartics is nowhere seriously undertaken; elliptic functions are not used, and some of the analysis is of a very clumsy character. The subject matter is so diffuse that a good index is indispensable to anybody using the book as a text-book: but the book cannot be recommended as a text-book, so perhaps the absence of an index is immaterial. The appearance of this treatise once again emphasises the necessity for a new edition of Salmon's 'Higher Plane Curves', brought up to date with the researches of the past twenty years. Now that the learned author is no more, perhaps some enterprising geometer will undertake the task: practically, the only modern work on the subject is Fiedler's German translation of Salmon, and a comparison of the contents of the original work and its translation is sufficient to show how far the subject has grown in the last few years.