In this paper I investigate some geometrical properties of a system of primals which arose a few years ago in the study of a purely algebraic problem: to parametrize completely the group of automorphic transformations of a given bilinear form. This problem is classical, and there exists a large literature on the subject, but the algebraists never succeeded in finding a complete parametrization. Indeed, the trend was to move away from those transformations not covered by the known parametrization; and Weyl, for example, writing about the orthogonal group in his book on the Classical Groups remarks ‘unfortunately Cayley's parametric representation leaves out some of the orthogonal matrices, and a good deal of our efforts will be spent in rendering these exceptions ineffective’. In another paper I shall show how to solve this problem of complete parametrization, via a geometrical approach; but here I confine my attention to some preliminary geometrical results.