"Crofton's lengthy article Probability which appeared in 1885 is still worth reading and is one of many outstanding articles in what many consider to be the greatest encyclopaedia ever produced."
-- MacTutor History of Mathematics archive (University of St Andrews, Scotland):
"In 1885, however, [Crofton] published what was perhaps his most important contribution to the field [geometrical probability], an extended entry on 'Probability' in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with its sixth section on local probability per se."
-- Eugene Seneta et al., "Nineteenth-Century Developments in Geometric Probability: J. J. Sylvester, M. W. Crofton, J.-É. Barbier, and J. Bertrand", in: Archive for History of Exact Sciences (Volume 55, Number 1, pp. 501-524)
"The subject of most of his [Crofton's] original memoirs was that beautiful combination of geometry with the integral calculus to which has been given (perhaps by himself) the name of Local Probability. In these investigations the elegant geometrical touch which he had acquired in the Dublin school found full scope. The whole subject of Probabilities fascinated him, as it had fascinated the somewhat kindred mind of Pascal; and he always expressed high admiration for Laplace's great treatise [Théorie analytique des probabilités (1812)]. His own lucid and elegant exposition of the subject in the ninth edition of the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' might well be recovered from oblivion, and should, in fact, survive as a classic on the subject."
-- Sir Joseph Larmor's 1915 obituary on Crofton and his assessment of Crofton's article, "Probability", in the Britannica, 9th edition. This obituary originally appeared in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (1915) (Volume s2_14 (1), pp. xxix-xxxviii.
