ABSTRACT
The first part of my title — How the Principia got its name — will, I hope, immediately recall to mind the “Just So” stories of Rudyard Kipling: “How the camel got his hump”, “How the leopard got his spots”, and most important of all, the question of How the elephant got its trunk. In these stories Kipling took what is the most typical and distinctive thing about certain animals, the feature which more than any other gives them their identity in our eyes, and imagines a state of affairs when that animal did not have that feature, and then tells a fantastic story about how it acquired it. That is to say, he makes the basic distinguishing, definitional, identity-giving characteristic first look odd, and then asks about its origin.
