These works were undoubtedly able; and for the
great proportion of University students going into active life, I do
not conceal my opinion that books constructed on the principles of
those which I have cited were more useful than those exclusively
founded on the more modern system. For those students who aimed at the
mastery of results more difficult and (in the intellectual sense) more
important, the older books were quite insufficient. More aspiring
students read, and generally with much care, several parts of Newton's
Principia, Book I., and also Book III. (perhaps the noblest example
of geometrical form of cosmical theory that the world has seen). I
remember some questions from Book III. proposed in the Senate-House
Examination 1823.
In the October term 1819, I went up to the University. The works of
Wood and Vince, which I have mentioned, still occupied the
lecture-rooms. But a great change was in preparation for the
University Course of Mathematics. During the great Continental war,
the intercourse between men of science in England and in France had
been most insignificant. But in the autumn of 1819, three members of
the Senate (John Herschel, George Peacock, and Charles Babbage) had
entered into the mathematical society of Paris, and brought away some
of the works on Pure Mathematics (especially those of Lacroix) and on
Mechanics (principally Poisson's).
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