extended after the seven years provided the Fellow took clerical
Orders. The limitation to seven years, although the Fellow
devoted himself exclusively to science, cut short and prevented
by anticipation the career of many a laborer for the advance-
ment of science. Sir Isaac Newton a Fellow of Trinity
College, and its limited terms nearly deprived the world of the
Principia.

The year after taking a Fellowship, Peacock was appointed
a tutor and lecturer of his college, which position he continued
to hold for many years. At that time the state of mathematical
learning at Cambridge was discreditable. How could that be?
you may ask; was not Newton a profossor of mathematics in
that University? did he not write the Principia in Trinity
College? had his influence died out so soon? The true reason
was he was worshipped too much as an authority; the Univer-
sity had settled down to the study of Newton instead of Nature,
and they had followed him in one grand mistake -- the ignoring
of the differential notation in the calculus. Students of the
differential calculus are more or less familiar with the controversy
which raged over the respective claims of Newton and Leibnitz
to the invention of the calculus; rather over the question whether
Leibnitz was an independent inventor, or appropriated the
fundamental ideas from Newton's writings and correspondence,
merely giving them a new clothing in the form of the differential
notation. Anyhow, Newton's countrymen adopted the latter
alternative; they clung to the fluxional notation of Newton;
and following Newton, they ignored the notation of Leibniz
and everything written in that notation. The Newtonian
notation is as follows: If y denotes a fluent, then y denotes its
fluxion, and y the fluxion of y; if y itself be considered a fluxion,
then y' denotes its fluent, and y" the fluent of y' and so on;
a differential is denoted by o. In the notation of Leibnitz y

result of this Chauvinism on the part of the British mathema-
ticians of the eighteenth century was that the developments of
the calculus were made by the contemporary mathematicians

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