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Add. MS a/608 · Item · 1 Aug. 1658
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Pera, Constant[ino]politanae - After an apology for the long delay in writing to the Fellowship, Barrow gives an account of his travels from Paris, with a description of his stay in Florence, prolonged because of the plague in Naples, which was predicted to spread to Rome whither he had planned to go next; heeding the warning that if caught by the plague he would not be able to leave, and it proving too difficult to reach Venice, he embarks on a ship to Constantinople. He describes the present state of affairs under the Grand Vizier, Koprulu Mehmed Pasha, who had come to power two years earlier: his work to restore the Ottoman name at home and abroad, recovering the islands of Tenedos and Lemnos, repelling an attack by the Venetian fleet, suppressing a revolt in Moldavia and Wallachia by removing their princes, repressing the infighting threatening the prestige of the empire, most recently undertaking an expedition to Transylvania on the pretext that Prince Ragotzy, a Turkish subject, had invaded Poland hoping to take the kingdom for himself. Barrow predicts that Christendom will find in the Grand Vizier its worst enemy and describes his punishment of Parthenius, the Patriarch of the Greek Church, who was accused of intrigue with the Duke of Muscovy despite the commonly held view that the accusations were false, and who was hanged and left on display in his Pontifical robes as a deterrent to plotters. Barrow closes with a promise to return to Cambridge within the year.

Docketed by William Derham, "Paper. 1. Dr Barrows Lr ...to the Fellows of Trin. Col. Cambridge from Constantinople. Caland August 1658. Publ. Lr 1. W.Ds.'

Barrow, Isaac (1630-1677), mathematician and theologian
Add. MS a/693 · Item · c 1681
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Poem addressed to Queen Catherine of Braganza on the occasion of the visit by Catherine and Charles II to Trinity to view the structure of the Wren Library, then being erected. Title as it appears is 'To the Queen spoken by Mr Duke in the new Court by ye Liberary [sic]'. First line, 'You equall partner in the Royall bed...'

Duke, Richard (1658-1711), poet and Church of England clergyman
Add. MS a/615 · Item · 1755-1756
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Diary entries and accounts kept by a student in his last year at Trinity College, Cambridge in a printed diary for 1753 altered to the later date the diary started in February 1755 and continuing on through the beginning of February 1756 when Hebbes left Trinity for Kensington. Hebbes records academic activities: declaiming in Chapel, presenting an epistle to the Master of Trinity Dr Smith, and paying the Moderator's man for huddling before being examined by Mr Howkins, and then by two moderators, and four fathers in the 'theatre'. His accounts record purchases of food, a subscription to Dockrell's Coffee House, and a variety of miscellaneous items: a new wig, repairs to his watch, Christmas boxes, as well as expenses relating to trips to London, Saffron Walden, Royston, Chesterton, and Stourbridge Fair. He records money won and lost at cards and bowls, and money given to the poor. He mentions selling books, makes payments to the Junior Proctor, Beadle, Head Lecturer and Senior Bursar, and buys a bachelor's gown, and wine and port for the 'Batchelor's table' before taking his degree. The diary also appears to have been used for handwriting practice by Ellen Hebbes and possibly other Hebbes children.

Hebbes, Thomas (c 1733-1766), clergyman
Add. MS a/79/522 · Item · 15 June 1814
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Includes an essay "On Hanno from the Latin of Kluge", possibly by Robert Leslie Ellis?, as well as three sheets written in French, also possibly by Robert Leslie Ellis (Items 502-505). Item 512, written from Morden and dated 15 June 1814, is written to "My dear Ellis", possibly Francis Ellis. Includes a letter addressed to Miss C. E. Marshall, Nile House, Sennen Cove, Lands End, Cornwall.

Letter from Joshua King
Add. MS a/207/161 · Item · 21 July 1814
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Lowick-bridge - Thanks WW for his 'valuable and much esteemed present' [his poem on Boadicea for which he won the Chancellor's Medal for the best English poem].

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/1 · Item · 4 Feb. 1817
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Slough - WW and George Peacock have 'absolutely turned his [Babbage] brain by your inflammatory conversation'. Babbage has been 'running analysis mad' and so has JH: 'I really have read and written more in the last fortnight than ever I did in twice the time in any other part of my life and I advise you to go and do likewise'. 'The distress of the poor and the pressure of the times forms the subject of conversation here'.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/2 · Item · 18 June 1817
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Slough - Baker, [Richard] Gwatkin and Wilkinson have been staying with JH. He is pleased WW is undertaking something definite but wishes it was 'something entirely original. Still I hope your transl. of the application of Geom.y to Alg. will be useful'. WW should give all the forms relative to ellipses of small and large excentricity. A 'compendium of them is a great desiderium'. There 'are divers forms respecting the intersection of strait lines in space which are of the most eminent use in optics which would be valuable'. JH has been working at the demonstration of Stewart's theorems. JH's work on algebra 'goes on steadily but not very rapidly'. Judging by WW's query it does not look as if he is doing much about functions.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/3 · Item · 26 July 1817
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JH and Babbage are 'analysing outrageously'. Could WW ask [George] Peacock whether he is making progress in the printing of a work entitled 'A Supplement to Lacroix' which should have been published some months ago.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/4 · Item · 19 Aug. 1818
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The Brighton Road - Belated thanks for WW's account of Stevin's [Simon Stevin] investigations about the composition and resolution of forces. JH finds what WW says of Stevin agreeable to what Lagrange says. JH has not been employed in experiments on polarization for some months, and instead has been 'familiarizing myself with the known phenomena, and acquiring that practical habit of experimentation without which it is useless to attempt anything new'. [David] Brewster's discovery of more than one polarising axis in various crystals is a most important discovery, and completely upsets [Jean Baptiste] Biot's division of doubly refracting crystals into attractive and repulsive. JH gives a description of his inquiries and where his experimental observations differ from Brewster's: 'I observed that the phenomenon of the miniature polarised rings which Brewster spoke of in a former paper, was very different in appearance and position from what his description had led me to expect'. Instead 'of one set of ellipses, complete or nearly so seen along the axis, I saw two half sets cut off across their conjugate axes, and equally distant from the axis of the nitre prism'. Brewster places nitre among the class of salts with two axes, and JH has observed three and even contiguous sets of rings.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/5 · Item · 1 Dec. 1819
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49 Charlotte St., Portland Pl. - Thanks WW for his Mechanics [An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, 1819]: WW has made too many 'concessions to the cramming system...and that the work would have been productive of more extensive good...had you conformed a little more to the taste of the age and a little less to that of the University'. JH has recommended WW's application to become a fellow of the Royal Society to Joseph Banks. 'Peacock's pamphlet is singularly stupid' and not worth being made the subject of a paper war. The new rules of the [Cambridge Philosophical] Society 'are very good with I think one exception, that which seems to authorize a system of debating on motions. If this be permitted I cannot conceive the possibility of the Society holding together long or maintaining its respectability'. JH thinks the meetings might receive great additional interest by admitting 2 sorts of communications to be read, one in the form of memoirs, formally got up with a view to publication, and another of a less formal character, containing notices of new facts, sketches of new views, such as give a kind of half publicity by being thus read in public, and thus at once send to secure a claim in case of future discovery, and to excite an interest in the pursuit of truths by railing a kind of philosophical hue and cry'. JH is to read his paper on polarisation to the Royal Society on Thursday: 'The object of the paper is to upset certain overhasty generalisations, a nuisance too common in optical science, and to prove the competency of Biot's theory of periodicity to explain all the phenomena of the polarised rings, which in crystals with 2 axes have hitherto presented anomalies of the most perplexing kind'.

Letter from Charles Babbage
Add. MS a/200/192 · Item · 15 May 1820
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Devonshire Rd, Portland Place - Babbage received WW's thirty guineas and has paid 31 for his fees at the Royal Society. Three members of the Astronomical Society have donated 100 guineas toward the Cambridge Observatory (50 came from William Pearson). 'Sir J. B [Joseph Banks] is about to resign and has recommended Davies Gilbert. But all sorts of plans speculations and schemes are afloat, and all sorts of people proper and improper are penetrated with the desire of wielding the sceptre of science. Whether this elective throne shall be filled by a philosopher or peer a priest or prince is a problem pendent on the fortuitous course of events. The Society is in a position of unstable equilibrium or rather it is like a comet which has not made up its mind whether it shall soberly circulate round the light of truth or traverse boundless space through endless time frying and damning the predestined infidels of other systems until some starry giant shall fascinate to its destruction this erring ball which has "run a muck" through creation'.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/7 · Item · 11 Nov. 1822
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Downing Street - Thanks WW for his outline of Mont Rosa which has dispelled any certainty he still held respecting the true figure, position, and altitude of that 'mysterious hill'. JH is 'heartily sick' of the Cambridge election and dislikes all the candidates.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/6 · Item · [1 Dec. 1822?]
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Could WW take the enclosed letters to Laplace and Edwards. Biot will introduce WW to Cuvier. If he sees Arago to ask him whether he received a letter from JH announcing his election to the Astronomical Society, and if he sees Picollet whether he got Babbage's letter on his machine. If JH's theodolite by Schenck has arrived at Bouvard's could WW take it back to England with him. The two blue pamphlets are for Cauchoix and Fortiu [the optician]. The printed letters about Babbage's machine are at his request to be given to Prony and Cauchy and any others WW may think interested.

Letter from George Airy
Add. MS a/200/1 · Item · 4 Sept. 1823
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Swansea - GA will be 'extremely glad' to have Neale as a pupil. However, further to his correspondence with Myers, he does not know whether Mr Hare had or had not already engaged a tutor for Neale. Could WW answer some questions further to the fellowship examination - 'In the first place must I sit at all? In the next place supposing that I sit, by what time must I be at Cambridge?'"

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/8 · Item · [1 Oct. 1823]
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WW should submit his paper to the Royal Society ['A General Method of Calculating the Angles Made by Any Planes of Crystals, and the Laws According to which They are Formed', Phil. Trans., 1825]: 'Your idea of denoting every possible secondary face by one symbol (p, q, r) where p, q, r may be either + or - is excellent'. Although JH had adopted 'decrements on edges as partcular cases of decrements on angles' he 'did not think of negative decrements, which give your method its generality'.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/9 · Item · [25 Nov. 1823]
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WW does not have to personally read his paper on Crystallography to the Royal Society, but should provide an abstract of it. If read and approved it should be published in the second part of the Society Transactions for 1824 ['A General Method of Calculating the Angles Made by Any Planes of Crystals, and the Laws According to which They are Formed', Phil. Trans., 1825]. A nephew (Henry White) of two old friends of JH's has entered Queen's College to be educated for a missionary. He has no introduction at College, and consequently could become a 'Fanatic instead of a reasonable dissemination of God's word and the gifts of civilisation'. Would WW call on him and take occasional care of his progress.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/10 · Item · 19 Dec. 1823
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Slough - JH has sent WW's paper to Davy 'with the character it merits (for he cannot read it) - one of the neatest applications of algebraic analysis I have seen' ['A General Method of Calculating the Angles Made by Any Planes of Crystals, and the Laws According to which They are Formed', Phil. Trans., 1825].

Letter from George Airy
Add. MS a/200/2 · Item · 26 Feb. 1824
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Trin: Coll: - Gives his 'critical' comments of WW's treatise on dynamics. He considers WW's enunciation of the laws of motion 'very far preferable to any other that I have seen'. GA emphasises the importance of attaching the same meaning to the word: 'It matters not whether there is at all such a thing as velocity in the world, provided we mathematicians know what we mean by it, and always attach the same meaning to the word. This latter is essential to logical reasoning: and in a science which is not founded on hypothesis but on experiments it is of the greatest consequence that the same word shall signify the same thing in the reports of the experiments and in the mathematical properties founded on them'. Drawing upon Atwood's machine and the philosophy of Locke, GA gives his definition of velocity: 'It is measured by causing the weights (as far as is in our power) to combine during a unit of time in the same rate of motion or at the time for which we desire to find the velocity, and the space thus described is called the velocity. To me the limit of ds/dt is rather difficult to get, but I find no difficulty in conceiving a body to continue to move with the same degree of motion which it has at any time (This perhaps appears absurd - but Locke says that we can comprehend relations between two things without having a clear idea of either)'. GA gives various mathematical corrections to WW's work: 'when I see Mr Whewell led astray in the use of the differential calculus by obscure principles and a bad notation I cannot help wishing that better were substituted'.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/11 · Item · 28 Nov. 1824
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2 Orchard St., Portman Sq. - WW's paper on Crystallography was read at the Royal Society and an abstract will be distributed at the next meeting ['A General Method of Calculating the Angles Made by Any Planes of Crystals, and the Laws According to which They are Formed', Phil. Trans., 1825]. JH did not hear whether WW had made any reference to Levy's paper in Brewster's journal. Because of the similarity with his paper, WW should refer to it in his abstract.

Add. MS a/648 · Item · 1824
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Bound unpublished manuscript with a title page laid out as if printed, including "London: John Murray, Albemarle-Street, 1824" at bottom, with "London: Printed by Thomas Davison, Whitefriars" on the verso of the half title. In the 13 page preface Buller takes issue with the editor of the second edition of Tyrwhitt's translation of The Poetics, arguing that much of Aristotle's works have been superseded by later works and discoveries and disparaging an Oxford education as never looking beyond Aristotle to Burke, Schlegel, Bacon, Locke, and other later writers. With a short post scriptum moderating the tone of his attack on the editor of the second edition of Tyrwhitt, instead placing the blame on the man's education at Oxford. The translation contains only part of Note I, and appears to be either incomplete or missing the rest of the notes, which appear in the body of the text as running up to XXVII.

Accompanied by a sheet of paper with notes in a different hand in French, Latin, and Greek laid in loose, quoting Thucydides on the plague of Athens.

Buller, Charles (1806-1848) politician and wit
Letter from George Airy
Add. MS a/200/3 · Item · 10 Aug. 1826
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Orleans - GA and his students are settled in Orleans and 'in as satisfactory a state of stable equilibrium as can be expected'. If his paper in the Philosophical Transactions has been published could WW send him 70 copies. Could WW tell [Henry] Kater 'that I have investigated a theory of the pendulum...as he suggested to me: and that the interval to reappearance does not follow so simple a law as he seemed to imagine?' And if he sees Young, that further to his letter addressed to GA in the Quarterly Journal, 'I get a different result? The result however consolidates his influence. The problem is, to find the form of a thin revolving fluid surrounding a nucleus'.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/12 · Item · 17 Aug. 1826
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JH's reasons for declining to become a candidate for the Lucasian Chair: He does 'not wish to devote myself exclusively or par excellence to any one branch of science - perhaps too a consciousness that I prefer physical to mathematical science'. Any science he does do 'I had rather should be considered as done an amateur than as a matter of duty and profession'. JH has written to [James] Wood to canvass for Babbage. JH has become 'an ultra-Huttonian in regard of long geological periods'.

Letter from John Herschel
Add. MS a/207/13 · Item · 28 Aug. 1826
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Calais - JH has told the printers to send WW the proofs of his article on light ['Treatise on Light', Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 1827], and is very obliged to WW for undertaking the superintendence of the press in his absence. JH has been careful with the history: 'I do not want to take on myself a task so insidious as balancing the merits and settling or even stating the claims of men so jealous as Brewster and Biot and Arago'.