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Trinity College - Does RJ still persuade himself that he is to write a review of WW's history? ['The History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time', 3 vols., 1837]. If RJ looks at the last Quarterly Review he will see 'that Lockhart and Murray appear resolved to have none but shallow articles...so I apprehend your chance there is small'. Has RJ seen Macaulay's [Thomas B. Macaulay] article on Bacon in the Edinburgh Review?: 'I rejoice to see how little people yet see the philosophy of induction for Macaulay is no bad example of the general thinker; and yet how scanty and superficial are his views - happily expressed and well illustrated of course'. Sir Charles Bell has complained to WW that he has been located 'with slight and injustice in page 425 of my third volume' ['The History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time', 3 vols., 1837]. Has RJ put 'down on paper, as clearly and strongly as you can, the reasons which you can find for the opinion you held a little while ago; - namely - that the simplest mechanical truths depend upon experience in a manner in which the simplest geometrical truths do not; - that the axioms of geometry may be self-evident, and known a priori; but that there are not axioms of mechanics so known and so evident. I am very desirous of getting this opinion in its best and most definite shape, because the rejection of it is a very leading point of my philosophy...The whole act of induction depends upon it'.

Has RJ read David Brewster's review of WW's history? ['On the History of the Inductive Sciences', Edinburgh Review, 66, 1837]. Does he think there is anything he needs to answer? Brewster 'has made the article for the most part an angry remonstrance in favour of his own rights unjustly withheld'. For example, WW does not quote from Brewster's 'Life of Newton' or his Edinburgh Journal of Science. That he does not give more credit to Brewster's arrangement of crystals or support his demands for more public rewards to men of science. And by referring to Brewster's controversies with French discoverers: 'I am disposed to stand upon my character and hold my tongue, till I can write my philosophy, and then I can get all to right that is really wrong'. The real injustice is in his history of physiology and neglect of Charles Bell [see WW to RJ, 6 September 1837]: 'If I could find any mode and channel of modifying this I would do it'. Brewster has also taken 'special care to overlook all that I have said of his rival Forbes' [James Forbes] discoveries'.