Soon after the death of Sir George Stokes, representations were made from various authoritative sources, including Lord Kelvin and Lord Rayleigh, that his papers should be carefully examined; as the experience of his friends and correspondents had shown that he was in possession of valuable improvements and advances in scientific subjects, which had not been adequately published to the world.

Fortunately it had been his custom to preserve all his papers; but for many years they had not been sorted, and their great bulk, as they appeared in the numerous packing cases to which they had been consigned from time to time, demanded an organised plan of attack.

They were in the first place sorted and arranged, after ephemeral printed matter had been rejected, by Mr S. Matthews, the Librarian of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, during the summer of 1902.

It then appeared that the bulk of formal manuscript material that was at all suitable for publication was small. What was found consisted largely of rough sheets containing jottings of arithmetical reductions and calculations, of which the net results had been either published by himself or communicated by letter to other workers. By far the greater part of the material was made up of scientific and official correspondence, amounting probably to more than ten thousand letters and memoranda, in many cases containing matter of high scientific value.

These papers, arranged according to dates and the names of his correspondents, were then further examined and a preliminary selection was made from them.