This volume contains papers on some questions of local history put together, mostly for undergraduate societies and magazines, at various times during the last twenty-five years. I have included a memoir, written for a London Society, on Newton’s Principia, a work that profoundly affected the development of University studies in the eighteenth century, and a chapter on the History of the Mathematical Tripos, which at one time appeared in my Mathematical Recreations and Essays, since these are concerned with Cambridge subjects.

I print the papers, whether long or short, and whether read at length or, as was more often the case, curtailed in delivery, substantially in the form in which they were first written. This leaves allusions which bear evidence to their domestic origin, and involves, in those of them dealing with cognate subjects, some repetition of facts. If these are defects they could be removed only by rewriting much of what appears here; it seems to me preferable to 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 they were first presented. The dates in the text are reckoned in the modern style, taking the year as beginning on the first day of January.

W.W. ROUSE BALL.