n
September." On the whole it is impossible to doubt that 1842 is the date
of the earlier of the two Essays.

{23} On p. 23 of the MS. of the _Foundations_ is a reference to the
"back of p. 21 bis": this suggests that additional pages had been
interpolated in the MS. and that it may once have had 37 in place
of 35 pp.

The sketch of 1842 is written on bad paper with a soft pencil, and is in
many parts extremely difficult to read, many of the words ending in mere
scrawls and being illegible without context. It is evidently written
rapidly, and is in his most elliptical style, the articles being
frequently omitted, and the sentences being loosely composed and often
illogical in structure. There is much erasure and correction, apparently
made at the moment of writing, and the MS. does not give the impression
of having been re-read with any care. The whole is more like hasty
memoranda of what was clear to himself, than material for the convincing
of others.

Many of the pages are covered with writing on the back, an instance of
his parsimony in the matter of paper{24}. This matter consists partly of
passages marked for insertion in the text, and these can generally
(though by no means always) be placed where he intended. But he also
used the back of one page for a preliminary sketch to be rewritten on a
clean sheet. These parts of the work have been printed as footnotes, so
as to allow what was written on the front of the pages to form a
continuous text. A certain amount of repetition is unavoidable, but much
of what is written on the backs of the pages is of too much interest to
be omitted. Some of the matter here given in footnotes may, moreover,
have been intended as the final text and not as the preliminary sketch.

{24} _Life and Letters_, i. p. 153.

When a word cannot be deciphered, it is replaced by:--<illegible>, the
angular brackets being, as already explained, a symbol for an insertion
by the editor. More commonly, however, the context makes the
interpretation of a word reasonably sure although the word is not
strictly legible. Such words are followed by an inserted mark of
interrogation <?>. Lastly, words inserted by the editor, of which the
appropriateness is doubtful, are printed thus <variation?>.

Two kinds of erasure occur in the MS. of 1842. One by vertical lines
which seem to have been made when the 35 pp. MS. was being expanded into
that of 1844, and merely imply that such