"In the meetings of the Philosophical Society a new mode of proceeding was introduced this term. To enliven the meetings, private members were requested to give oral lectures. Mine was the second, I think, and I took for subject The Machinery of the Steam Engines in the Cornish mines, and especially of the Pumping Engines and Pumps. It made an excellent lecture: the subjects were at that time undescribed in books, and unknown to engineers in general out of Cornwall. "My College lectures seem to have been, Oct. 21st to Dec. 14th to 31 Junior Sophs, Dec. 4th to 12th to 12 Senior Sophs. I assisted at the examinations of the Questionists. I had no private pupils. On Nov. 26th I communicated to the Cambridge Philosophical Society a Paper on the Theory of Pendulums, Balances, and Escapements: and I find applications of Babbage's symbolism to an escapement which I proposed. I have various investigations about the Earth, supposed to project at middle latitudes above the elliptical form. In November an account of the Dolcoath failure (by Whewell) was given to the Royal Society. "At length on Dec. 7th, 1826, the election to the Lucasian Professorship took place: I was elected (I think unanimously) and admitted. I believe that this gave great satisfaction to the University in general. My uncle, Arthur Biddell, was in Cambridge on that evening, and was the first of my friends who heard of it. On the same page of my quires on which this is mentioned, there is a great list of apparatus to be constructed for Lucasian Lectures, notes of experiments with Atwood's Machine, &c. In December, correspondence with Dollond about prisms. I immediately issued a printed notice that I would give professorial lectures in the next Term. "On Dec. 13th I have a letter from Mr Smith informing me of the dangerous illness (fever) which had attacked nearly every member of his family, Richarda worst of all. On Dec. 23rd I went to Bury. The affairs with Cropley had been settled by the sale of his property under execution, and my father did not lose much of his debt. But he had declined much in body and mind, and now had strange hallucinations.