Add. MS 7656: Stokes Collection

The papers of Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903), now in Cambridge University Library, were at one time almost all in the possession of the mathematician and scientist Sir Joseph Larmor. They came to the University Library at various dates between 1937 and 1964, the major part being transferred from the Library of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1952.

All this material is now assembled in one, artificial, collection, Add. MS 7656. The collection includes Stokes and Larmor material transferred from Add. 7618, and the correspondence involving Stokes, Kelvin, Maxwell, and Faraday formerly held under the reference Add. 2766 (4) 1-66. There are separate sections for correspondence, papers, and notebooks, although both the papers and notebooks series include a small quantity of further correspondence. The main correspondence sequence is particularly extensive, including letters from family, friends, and many important scientists of his day. Among Stokes' more frequent correspondents were John Couch Adams, George Biddell Airy, William Crookes, John Frederick William Herschel, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Larmor, Richard Owen, William Alexander Ross, Robert Henry Scott, Henry Josiah Sharpe, Henry Clifton Sorby, Peter Guthrie Tait, George Mathews Whipple, and Walter White.

The Stokes Collection is open to all holders of full Library Reader's Tickets. For a published guide see David B. Wilson, Catalogue of the manuscript collections of Sir George Gabriel Stokes and Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, in Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, 1976.

Contact: Adam Perkins (01223-333056; ajp21@cam.ac.uk).

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