Item 174 - Letter from George Airy

4 pp.

Royal Observatory Greenwich - Thanks WW for his 'most acceptable Platonic 3d. volume - and in procuring for me Grote's [George Grote] Dissertation [see GA to WW, 19 Feb. 1862]. GA cannot emphasise how valuable WW's translation of Plato's Republic is to those 'who conceive ourselves able to read the original, but who have not the leisure or freedom of thought required for running over a whole book so as to pick up the train of ideas. By virtue of your traduction raisonnée, with occasional references to the original, I really know ten times as much of Plato as I did'. GA does not 'catch the value of the successive harmonic numbers in the Timaeus'. Could WW send GA's enclosed criticisms of George Grote's Dissertation [see GA to WW, 19 Feb. 1862].