How useful a knowledge of history would be to me
now. To lighten an article like this with a reference to what
Garibaldi said to Cavour in '53; to round off a sentence with the
casual remark, "As was the custom in Alexander's day"; to trace back
a religious tendency, or a fair complexion, or the price of boots to
some barbarian invasion of a thousand years ago--how delightfully easy
it would be, I tell myself, to write with such knowledge at one's
disposal. One would never be at a loss for a subject, and plots for
stories, plays, and historical novels would be piled up in one's brain
for the choosing. But what can one do with mathematics--save count the
words of an article (when written) with rather more quickness and
accuracy than one's fellow writer? Did I spend ten years at
mathematics for this? The waste of it!
But perhaps those years were not so wasted as they seem to have been.
Not only Functions of a Quaternion, but other of these books, chatty
books about hydro-mechanics and dynamics of a particle (no, not an
article--that might have been helpful--a particle), gossipy books
about optics and differential equations, many of these have a
comforting air of cleanness; as if, having bought them at the
instigation of my instructor, I had felt that this was enough, and
that their mere presence in my bookcase was a sufficient talisman; a
talisman the more effective because my instructor had marked some of
the chapters "R"--meaning, no doubt, _"Read carefully"_--and other
chapters "RR" or _"Read twice as carefully.
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