Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/113

 poetry, the number depending very much on his own choice. Airy repeated 100 lines every week; on one occasion he repeated more than 2000 lines. The schoolmaster was impressed with his powers and suggested to his father that the boy should be sent to Cambridge; who, on inquiry, concluded that the expense was too great for his straitened circumstances. However, the uncle took up the problem, and with the help of a Cambridge alumnus got the boy prepared in classics and mathematics for the entrance examination to Trinity College. In these preliminary examinations he acquitted himself so well, that a reputation for scholarship preceded his going there to reside. In 1819, when 18 years old, he commenced residence as a sizar of Trinity College. By a sizar is meant a poor student who is exempted from some of the expenses—he does not pay for dinner in hall; the sizars dine after all the rest, on the remains of the Fellows' dinner. Newton himself started in that same college as a sizar. George Peacock, who was then a mathematical tutor of the college, became his warm friend and adviser; he gave him a copy of Lacroix's Differential Calculus, translated by himself, Babbage, and Herschel, and also a copy of his Collection of Examples. At this time the Differential Calculus was beginning to prevail over Fluxions; Airy had got instruction in the old method, but he took to the new with great industry. At a breakfast party at Peacock's he met Whewell, who was a resident fellow graduate of the University.

Airy employed part of his first vacation in writing out a paper on the geometrical interpretation of $$\sqrt{-1}$$. He got the suggestion of "perpendicular" from some book; the aim of his essay was to apply that theory. Peacock to whom he showed the essay was much pleased. Mr. Hustler, his tutor, on the contrary disapproved of his employing his time on such speculations. The former was a philosopher and reformer, the latter an official and disposed to consider everything that is, is right. Airy however, whether by the influence of Hustler or otherwise, did not go very deep into the subject. He afterwards wrote: "I have not the smallest confidence in any result which is essentially obtained by the use of imaginary