I doubt your being the last fluxional senior wrangler. So far as I know, Gipps, Langdale, Alderson, Dicey, Neale, may contest this point with you. The answer, dated 7 August 1869, of Sir Frederick Pollock to these questions was as follows: You have put together as _revivers_ five very different men. Woodhouse was better than Waring, who could not prove Wilson's (Judge of C. P.) guess about the property of prime numbers; but Woodhouse (I think) did prove it, and a beautiful proof it is. Vince was a bungler, and I think utterly insensible of mathematical beauty. Now for your questions. I did not get my conic sections from Vince. I copied a MS. of Dealtry. I fell in love with the cone and its sections, and everything about it. I have never forsaken my favourite pursuit; I delighted in such problems as two spheres touching each other and also the inside of a hollow cone, &c. As to Newton, I read a good deal (men _now_ read nothing), but I read much of the notes. I detected a blunder which nobody seemed to be aware of. Tavel, tutor of Trinity, was not; and he argued very favourably of me in consequence. The application of the Principia I got from MSS. The blunder was this: in calculating the resistance of a globe at the end of a cylinder oscillating in a resisting medium they had forgotten to notice that there is a difference between the resistance to a globe and a circle of the same diameter. The story of Whewell and Jacob cannot be true. Whewell was a very, _very_ considerable man, I think not a _great_ man. I have no doubt Jacob beat him in accuracy, but the supposed answer _cannot_ be true; it is a mere echo of what actually passed between me and Hornbuckle on the day the Tripos came out--for the truth of which I vouch. I think the examiners are taking too _practical_ a turn; it is a waste of time to calculate _actually_ a longitude by the help of logarithmic tables and lunar observations. It would be a fault not to know _how_, but a greater to be handy at it. A few minor changes in the senate-house examination were made in 1808[59]. A fifth day was added to the examination. Of the five days thus given up to it three were devoted to mathematics, one to logic, philosophy, and religion, and one to the arrangement of the brackets. Apart from the evening paper the examination on each of the first three days lasted six hours: of these eighteen hours, eleven were assigned to bookwork and seven to problems. The problem papers were set from six to ten in the evening. A letter from Whewell, dated 19 January 1816, thus describes his examination in the senate-house[60]: