Letter from W D [William Davidson] Niven, Royal Naval College, Greenwich, to [Joseph] Larmor The 'wretched thing of mine about capacities' will give trouble to everyone and he is sorry that Larmor has wasted a morning on it. He encloses what he had written in his rough notes about the complemetary function, the same points as are in Larmor's notes. Guessing the value of f (theta) is nonsense, and as for Larmor's way of solving this, Niven avoided it, giving his reasons. He discusses other aspects of the paper, including finding the potential at any point; he is hampered by his former paper and by [Hector] Macdonald's solution, the merits of which he has always acknowledged. The less he says on the present occasion the better. Larmor sent him a 'pretty' note about capacity and he had always meant to look at [George] Chrystal's paper in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which had something of the same kind. 8 December 1896