X 
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF ARTHUR CAYLEY. 
Mr. Henry Cayley took his young family to Russia and remained there for a few 
years. On retiring from business in 1829, he returned to England and settled into 
residence at Blackheath. Arthur was sent soon afterwards to a private school there, 
kept by the Rev. G. B. F. Potticary; and when he was fourteen he was transferred 
to King’s College School, London. At a very early age he had begun to show some 
of those preferences by which the existence of mathematical ability is wont to reveal 
itself; he had a great liking for numerical calculations and he developed a great 
aptitude for them. 
In his new school the boy showed himself to be possessed of remarkable ability: 
his power of grasping a new subject very rapidly and of seizing its central principles 
was certainly unusual. An old friend tells of an examination in chemistry : the subject 
had not been studied by Cayley before, but he soon acquired sufficient knowledge to 
carry off the medal from the professedly chemical students, to their surprise and morti 
fication *. But it was most of all by the indications of mathematical genius that he 
astonished his teachers. It had been Mr. Cayley’s intention to educate his son with 
the view of placing him in his former business—an intention not abandoned without 
reluctance. The impression, however, produced upon his teachers could not lightly be 
set aside; and the advice of the Principal to send him to Cambridge, where his 
abilities promised to secure brilliant distinction, was adopted. 
Accordingly, he went to Cambridge. He was entered at Trinity College on 2nd May, 
1838, as a pensioner, and he began residence in the succeeding October at the unusually 
early age of seventeen. He passed through the ordinary stages in the career of a 
successful student of mathematics. Like the other able undergraduates of his period, 
he “ coached ” with William Hopkins of Peterhouse, who has been described as a great 
and stimulating teacher—a description justified by the high achievements of a long 
line of distinguished and grateful pupils. 
Cayley’s fame grew rapidly: and, as is the way of Cambridge undergraduates, he 
soon was pointed out as the future Senior Wrangler of the year. It is interesting to 
find a record of him written about this time and published not long afterwards by an 
acquaintance^, who says that:— 
“ As an undergraduate he had generally the reputation of a mere mathe 
matician, which did him great injustice, for he was really a man of much varied 
information, and that on some subjects the very opposite of scientific—for instance, 
he was well up in all the current novels, an uncommon thing at Cambridge 
where novel-reading is not one of the popular weaknesses.” 
* It may be added that he maintained his interest in chemistry throughout his life, and acquired a con 
siderable knowledge of it. When he was at Baltimore, in 1882, lecturing at the Johns Hopkins University 
by special invitation, he attended Professor Remsen’s lectures with a pleasure which found expression in his 
letters home to his children in England. And on one occasion, at Professor Remsen’s request, he lectured 
to the chemistry class on the hydrocarbon “trees” (Brit. Assoc. Report, 1875, pp. 257—305). 
+ Bristed, Five Years in an English University (second edition, 1852), p. 95. 
It may be added that Cayley declared the story about him in the tripos, recorded by Bristed, to be quite 
apocryphal. 
So also was another story, belonging to a later part of his life, according to which he is reported to 
have said that “the object of law was to say a thing in the greatest number of words, and of mathematics 
to say it in the fewest ”: this view, and the possibility of his ever having held it, he repudiated entirely. 
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