[i]
CAMBRIDGE PAPERS.

[v]
PREFACE.

This volume contains papers on some questionsof local history put together, mostly for undergraduatesocieties and magazines, at various timesduring the last twenty-five years. I have included amemoir, written for a London Society, on Newton’sPrincipia, a work that profoundly affected the developmentof University studies in the eighteenthcentury, and a chapter on the History of theMathematical Tripos, which at one time appearedin my Mathematical Recreations and Essays, sincethese are concerned with Cambridge subjects.

I print the papers, whether long or short, andwhether read at length or, as was more often thecase, curtailed in delivery, substantially in theform in which they were first written. This leavesallusions which bear evidence to their domesticorigin, and involves, in those of them dealing withcognate subjects, some repetition of facts. If theseare defects they could be removed only by rewritingmuch of what appears here; it seems to me preferableto let the essays stand in their original forms,save occasionally for the addition of a paragraph or[vi] sentence dealing with what has happened since theywere first presented. The dates in the text arereckoned in the modern style, taking the year asbeginning on the first day of January.

W. W. ROUSE BALL.