Collaborating with Percival Frost, a Treatise on Solid Geometry was published in 1863.

He became a professor of mathematics at the Royal Indian Engineering College at Cooper's Hill, Egham, Surrey from 1871 to 1889.

In 1878 he published an expanded version of Mathematical Problems, and in 1888 Examples for Practice in the Use of Seven-figure Logarithms.

He was a close friend of Leslie Stephen from his undergraduate studies at Cambridge.

Virginia Woolf used his personality for the character Augustus Carmichael in her novel To the Lighthouse.