"Beltrami's idea was to find in space a surface with the property that if you define distance thereon in terms of geodesic length, you have the geometry of Lobachevski. An analogous idea is to find a new definition for distance such that, starting from our familiar space, if we redefine distance in this way we may have the obtuse-angled geometry, elliptic geometry, or the acute-angled, hyperbolic geometry of Lobachevski. An illuminating example of this sort was worked out by Klein following a hint dropped by Cayley. The root of the matter goes back to Laguerre... in 1858..."