"But in dealing with given quantics, we may without loss of generality consider the covariant as a function of the like form with the quantic,..." — Arthur Cayley, An Introductory Memoir upon Quantics, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 144, (1854), pp. 245-258.

The equivalent phrase "without losing generality" appears earlier in Stokes, On the steady motion of incompressible fluids, Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 7 (1842) 439-453.