be given by avoiding
all suppression. I cannot think that this is so in the case of an
editor. Nor can I believe that Airy would have approved of one detail in
his son's method of printing the book, namely, that the diary is enclosed
in inverted commas throughout, while the editor's occasional remarks are
without them. It would surely have been simpler to say once for all that
what is printed is an accurate copy of the diary, and to have given the
editor's remarks within square brackets.

George Biddell Airy was born at Alnwick on 27th July 1801. He seems to
have belonged to a Westmoreland family, but his forbears for several
generations were small farmers in Lincolnshire. His father, William
Airy, was clearly a person of energy and forethought, who laid by his
summer's earnings "in order to educate himself in winter." He gave up
farming as a young man and found employment in the excise, a profession
not without danger in those early days when contraband trade was common.
He is said to have had many fights with smugglers, but did not suffer the
fate of the gauger in _Guy Mannering_, for Dirck Hatteraicks were not so
common as youthful readers might desire.

In 1810 William Airy was transferred to Colchester, where, if there were
fewer smugglers, there was more opportunity for education; and George was
sent to a school in a street bearing the attractive name of Sir Isaac's
Walk. Four years later Airy went to the Colchester Grammar School, where
he remained until 1819, when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. The
only point of interest connected with his school life is the record (in
his own words) of Airy's remarkable verbal memory. "It was the custom
for each boy once a week to repeat a number of lines of Latin or Greek
poetry, the number depending very much on his own choice. I determined
on repeating 100 every week. . . . It was no distress to me, and great
enjoyment. At Michaelmas 1816 I repeated 2394 lines, probably without
missing a word."

On 18th October 1819 he went to Cambridge "on the top of the coach," and
was installed in lodgings in Bridge Street. A reputation for mathematics
had preceded him, and he was kindly received by Mr Peacock {164} and
Professor Sedgwick. It will be remembered that some twenty years later
both these personages interested themselves in another Cambridge
undergraduate--Charles Darwin.

Airy (p. 23) showed Mr Peacock a manuscript book containing "a number of
origin