Lord Kelvin Part 4

The _University Calendar_ for 1863-4 states that "the Natural Philosophy Cla.s.s meets two hours daily, 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. The first hour is chiefly spent in statements of Principles, description of Results of Observation, and Experimental Ill.u.s.trations. The second hour is devoted to Mathematical Demonstrations and Exercises, and Examinations on all parts of the Course.

"The Text Books to be used are: 'Elements of Dynamics' (first part now ready), Printed by George Richardson, University Printer. 'Elements of Natural Philosophy,' by Professors W. Thomson and P. G. Tait (Two Treatises to be published before November. Macmillan.[14])

"The shorter of the last mentioned Treatises will be used for the work required of all students of Natural Philosophy in the regular curriculum. The whole or specified parts of the larger Treatise will be prescribed in connection with voluntary examinations and exercises in the Cla.s.s, and for candidates for the degree of M.A. with honours.

Students who desire to undertake these higher parts of the business of the cla.s.s, ought to be well prepared on all the subjects of the Senior Mathematical Cla.s.s.

"The Laboratory in connection with the cla.s.s is open daily from 9 a.m.

to 4 p.m. for Experimental Exercises and Investigations, under the direction of the Professor and his official a.s.sistant."

In 1847 the meetings for experimental physics were changed to 11 a.m.

The hour 9 a.m. is still (1908) retained for the regular meetings of the ordinary cla.s.s, and 11 a.m. for meetings held twice a week for exercises and tutorial work, attendance at which is optional.

[A second graduating cla.s.s has now been inst.i.tuted and is very largely attended. Each student attends three lectures and spends four hours in the laboratory each week. A higher cla.s.s, in two divisions, is also held.]

At an early date in his career as a professor Thomson called in the aid of his students for experimental research. In many directions the properties of matter still lay unexplored, and it was necessary to obtain exact data for the perfecting of the theories of elasticity, electricity and heat, which had been based on the researches of the first half of the nineteenth century. To the authors of these theories--Gauss, Green, Cauchy and others--he was a fit successor. Not knowing all that had been done by these men of genius, he reinvented, as we have seen, some of their great theorems, and in somewhat later work, notably in electricity and magnetism, set the theories on a new basis cleared of all extraneous and unnecessary matter, and reduced the hypotheses and a.s.sumptions to the smallest possible number, stated with the most careful precautions against misunderstanding. As this work was gradually accomplished the need for further experiment became more and more clearly apparent. Accordingly he established at the old College in the High Street, what he has justly claimed was the first physical laboratory for students.[15] An old wine-cellar in the bas.e.m.e.nt adjoining the Natural Philosophy Cla.s.s-room was first annexed, and was the scene of early researches, which were to lead to much of the best work of the present time. To this was added a little later the Blackstone Examination-room, which, disused and "left unprotected," was added to the wine-cellar, and gave s.p.a.ce for the increasing corps of enthusiastic workers who came under the influence of the new teacher, and were eager to be a.s.sociated with his work. A good many of the researches which were carried out in this meagre accommodation in the old College will be mentioned in what follows.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INNER COURT OF THE OLD COLLEGE

Showing Natural Philosophy Rooms]

[In the view of the inner court of the Old College given opposite, the windows on the ground-floor to the right of the turret in front, are those of the Blackstone Examination-room, which formed a large part of the new Physical Laboratory. The windows above these, on the second floor, are those of the Apparatus-room of the Natural Philosophy Department. Between the turret on the right of the picture and the angle of the court are the windows of the Natural Philosophy Cla.s.s-room. The attic above the Apparatus-room was at a later time occupied by the Engineering Department, under Professor Macquorn Rankine.]

Here again we may quote from the Bangor address:

"Soon after I entered my present chair in the University of Glasgow in 1846 I had occasion to undertake some investigations of electrodynamic qualities of matter, to answer questions suggested by the results of mathematical theory, questions which could only be answered by direct experiment. The labour of observing proved too heavy, much of it could scarcely be carried on without two or more persons, working together. I therefore invited students to aid in the work. They willingly accepted the invitation, and lent me most cheerful and able help. Soon after, other students, hearing that their cla.s.s-fellows had got experimental work to do, came to me and volunteered to a.s.sist in the investigation. I could not give them all work in the particular investigation with which I had commenced--'the electric convection of heat'--for want of means and time and possibilities of arrangement, but I did all in my power to find work for them on allied subjects (Electrodynamic Properties of Metals, Moduluses of Elasticity of Metals, Elastic Fatigue, Atmospheric Electricity, etc.). I then had an ordinary cla.s.s of a hundred students, of whom some attended lectures in natural philosophy two hours a day, and had nothing more to do from morning till night. These were the balmy days of natural philosophy in the University of Glasgow--the pre-Commissional days. But the majority of the cla.s.s really had very hard work, and many of them worked after cla.s.s-hours for self-support.

Some were engaged in teaching, some were city-missionaries, intending to go into the Established Church of Scotland or some other religious denomination of Scotland, or some of the denominations of Wales, for I always had many Welsh students. In those days, as now, in the Scottish Universities all intending theological students took a 'philosophical curriculum'--'zuerst collegium logic.u.m,' then moral philosophy, and (generally last) natural philosophy. Three-fourths of my volunteer experimentalists used to be students who entered the theological cla.s.ses immediately after the completion of the philosophical curriculum. I well remember the surprise of a great German professor when he heard of this rule and usage: 'What! do the theologians learn physics?' I said, 'Yes, they all do; and many of them have made capital experiments. I believe they do not find that their theology suffers at all from (their) having learned something of mathematics and dynamics and experimental physics before they enter upon it.'"

This statement, besides throwing an interesting light on the conditions of university work sixty years ago, gives an ill.u.s.tration of the wide interpretation in Scotland of the term Arts. Here it has meant, since the Chair of Natural Philosophy was founded in 1577, and held by one of the Regents of the University, _Artes Liberales_ in the widest sense, that is, the study of _Litterae Humaniores_ (including mental and moral philosophy) and physical and mathematical science. These were all deemed necessary for a liberal education at that time: in the scientific age in which we live it is more imperative than ever that neither should be excluded from the Arts curriculum of our Universities. The common distinction between Arts and Science is a false one, and the product of a narrow idea which is alien to the traditions of our northern Universities.

It is to be noted, however, that the laboratory thus founded was essentially a research laboratory; it was not designed for the systematic instruction of students in methods of experimenting.

Laboratories for this purpose came later, and as a natural consequence.

But for the best students, ill prepared as, no doubt, some of them were for the work of research, the experience gained in such a laboratory was very valuable. They learned--and, indeed, had to learn--in an incidental manner how to determine physical constants, such as specific gravities, thermal capacities, electric resistances, and so forth. For, apart from the _Relations des Experiences_ of Regnault, and the magnetic and electric work of Gauss and Weber, there was no systematised body of information available for the guidance of students. Good students could branch out from the main line of inquiry, so as to acquire skill in subsidiary determinations of this kind; to the more easily daunted student such difficulties proved formidable, and often absolutely deterrent.

It is not easy for a physicist of the present day to realise the state of knowledge of the time, and so he often fails to recognise the full importance of Thomson's work. The want of precise knowledge of physical constants was to a considerable extent a consequence of the want of exact definitions of quant.i.ties to be determined, and in a much greater degree of the lack of any system of units of measurement. The study of phenomena was in the main merely qualitative; where an attempt had been made to obtain quant.i.tative determinations, the units employed were arbitrary and dependent on apparatus in the possession of the experimenter, and therefore unavailable to others. In the department of heat, as has been said, a great beginning had been made by Regnault, in whose hands the exact determination of physical constants had become a fine art.

In electricity and magnetism there were already the rudiments of quant.i.tative measurement. But it was only long after, when the actions of magnets and of electric currents had been much further studied, that the British a.s.sociation entered on its great work of setting up a system of absolute units for the measurement of such actions. Up till then the resistance, for example, of a piece of wire, to the pa.s.sage of an electric current along it, was expressed by some such specification as that it was equal to the resistance of a certain piece of copper wire in the experimenter's possession. It was therefore practically impossible for experimenters elsewhere to profit by the information. And so in other cases. An example from Thomson's papers on the "Dynamical Theory of Heat" may be cited here, though it refers to a time (1851) when some progress towards obtaining a system of absolute units had been made. In -- 118 (Art. XLVIII) he states that the electromotive force of a thermoelectric couple of copper and bis.m.u.th, at temperatures 0 C. and 100 C. of its functions, might be estimated from a comparison made by Pouillet of the strength of the current sent by this electromotive force through a copper wire 20 metres long and 1 millimetre in diameter, with the strength of a current decomposing water at a certain rate, were it not that the specific resistances of different specimens of copper are found to differ considerably from one another. Hence, though an estimate is made, it is stated that, without experiments on the actual wire used by Pouillet, it was impossible to arrive at an accurate result. Now if it had been in Pouillet's power to determine accurately the resistance of his circuit in absolute units, there would have been no difficulty in the matter, and his result would have been immediately available for the estimate required.

When submarine cables came to be manufactured and laid all this had to be changed. For they were expensive; an Atlantic cable, for example, cost half a million sterling. The state of the cable had to be ascertained at short intervals during manufacture; a similar watch had to be kept upon it during the process of laying, and afterwards during its life of telegraphic use. The observations made by one observer had therefore to be made available to all, so that, with other instruments and at another place, equivalent observations could be made and their results quant.i.tatively compared with those of the former. To set up a system of measurement for such purposes as these involved much theoretical discussion and an enormous amount of experimental investigation. This was undertaken by a special committee of the a.s.sociation, and a princ.i.p.al part in furnis.h.i.+ng discussions of theory and in devising experimental methods was taken by Thomson. The committee's investigations took place at a date somewhat later in Thomson's career than that with which we are here dealing, and some account of them will be given in a later chapter; but much work, preparatory for and leading up to the determination of electrical standards, was done by the volunteer laboratory corps in the transformed wine-cellar of the old College.

The selection and realisation of electrical standards was a work of extraordinary importance to the world from every point of view--political, commercial, and social. It not only rendered applications of electricity possible in the arts and industries, but by relieving experimental results from the vagueness of the specifications formerly in use, made the further progress of pure electrical science a matter in which every step forward, taken by an individual worker, facilitated the advance of all. But like other toilsome services, the nature of which is not clear to the general public, it has never received proper acknowledgment from those who have profited by it. If Thomson had done nothing more than the work he did in this connection, first with his students and later with the British a.s.sociation Committee, he would have deserved well of his fellow-countrymen.

When Professor Thomson was entering on the duties of his chair, and calling his students to his aid, the discoveries of Faraday on the induction of currents by the motion of magnets in the neighbourhood of closed circuits of wire, or, what comes to the same thing, the motion of such circuits in the "fields" of magnets, had not been long given to the world, and were being pondered deeply by natural philosophers. The time was ripe for a quant.i.tative investigation of current induction, like that furnished by the genius of Ampere after the discovery by Oersted of the deflection of a magnet by an electric current. Such an investigation was immensely facilitated by Faraday's conception of lines of magnetic force, the cutting of which by the wire of the circuit gave rise to the induced current. Indeed, the mathematical ideas involved were indicated, and not obscurely, by Faraday himself. But to render the mathematical theory explicit, and to investigate and test its consequences, required the highest genius. This work was accomplished in great measure by Thomson, whose presentation of electrodynamic theory helped Maxwell to the view that light was an affair of the propagation of electric and magnetic vibrations in an insulating medium, the light-carrying ether.

Another investigation on which he had already entered in 1847 was of great importance, not only for pure science but for the development and proper economy of all industrial operations. The foundations on which a dynamical theory of heat was to be raised had been partly laid by Carnot and were being completed on the experimental side by James Prescott Joule, whom Thomson met in 1847 at the meeting of the British a.s.sociation at Oxford. The meeting at Oxford in 1860 is memorable to the public at large, mainly on account of the discussion which took place on the Darwinian theory, and the famous dialectic encounter between Bishop Wilberforce and Professor Huxley; the Oxford meeting of 1894 will always be a.s.sociated with the announcement of the discovery of argon by Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Ramsay: the meeting of 1847 might quite as worthily be remembered as that at which Joule laid down, with numerical exact.i.tude, the first law of thermodynamics. Joule brought his experimental results before the Mathematical and Physical Section at that meeting; and it appears probable that they would have received scant attention had not their importance been forcibly pointed out by Thomson. Communications thereafter pa.s.sed frequently between the two young physicists, and there soon began a collaboration of great value to science, and a friends.h.i.+p which lasted till the death of Joule in 1884.

[See p. 88 below.]

We shall devote the next few chapters to an account, as free from technicalities as possible, of these great divisions of Thomson's earlier original work as professor at Glasgow.

CHAPTER VI

FRIENDs.h.i.+P WITH STOKES AND JOULE. EARLY WORK AT GLASGOW

During his residence at Cambridge Thomson gained the friends.h.i.+p of George Gabriel Stokes, who had graduated as Senior Wrangler and First Smith's Prizeman in 1841. They discussed mathematical questions together and contributed articles on various topics to the _Cambridge Mathematical Journal_. In 1846 "Cambridge and Dublin" was subst.i.tuted for "Cambridge" in the t.i.tle of the Journal, and a new series was begun under the editors.h.i.+p of Thomson. A feature of the earlier volumes of the new issue was a series of Notes on Hydrodynamics written by agreement between Thomson and Stokes, and printed in vols. ii, iii, and v. The first, second, and fifth of the series were written by Thomson, the others by Stokes. The matter of these Notes was not altogether novel; but many points were put in a new and more truly physical light, and the series was no doubt of much service to students, for whose use the articles were intended. Some account of these Notes will be given in a later chapter on Thomson's hydrodynamical papers.

For the mathematical power and sure physical instinct of Stokes Thomson had always the greatest admiration. When asked on one occasion who was the most outstanding worker in physical science on the continent, he replied, "I do not know, but whoever he is, I am certain that Stokes is a match for him." In a report of an address which he delivered in June 1897, at the celebration of the Jubilee of Sir George Stokes as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Lord Kelvin referred to their early intercourse at Cambridge in terms which were reported as follows: "When he reflected on his own early progress, he was led to recall the great kindness shown to himself, and the great value which his intercourse with Sir George Stokes had been to him through life. Whenever a mathematical difficulty occurred he used to say to himself, 'Ask Stokes what he thinks of it.' He got an answer if answer was possible; he was told, at all events, if it was unanswerable. He felt that in his undergraduate days, and he felt it more now."

After the death of Stokes in February 1902, Lord Kelvin again referred, in an enthusiastic tribute in Nature for February 12, to these early discussions. "Stokes's scientific work and scientific thought is but partially represented by his published writings. He gave generously and freely of his treasures to all who were fortunate enough to have an opportunity of receiving from him. His teaching me the principles of solar and stellar chemistry when we were walking about among the colleges sometime prior to 1852 (when I vacated my Peterhouse Fellows.h.i.+p to be no more in Cambridge for many years) is but one example."

The interchange of ideas between Stokes and Thomson which began in those early days went on constantly and seems to have been stimulating to both. The two men were in a sense complementary in nature and temperament. Both had great power and great insight, but while Stokes was uniformly calm, reflective, and judicial, Thomson's enthusiasm was more outspokenly fervid, and he was apt to be at times vehement and impetuous in his eagerness to push on an investigation; and though, as became his nationality, he was cautious in committing himself to conclusions, he exercised perhaps less reserve in placing his results before the public of science.

A characteristic instance of Thomson's vehement pursuit of experimental results may be given here, although the incidents occurred at a much later date in his career than that with which we are at present concerned. In 1880 the invention of the Faure Secondary Battery attracted his attention. M. Faure brought from Paris some cells made up and ready charged, and showed in the Physical Laboratory at Glasgow the very powerful currents which, in consequence of their very low internal resistance, they were capable of producing in a thick piece of copper wire. The cells were of the original form, constructed by coating strips of sheet lead on both sides with a paste of minium moistened with dilute sulphuric acid, swathing them in woollen cloth sewed round them, and then rolling two together to form the pair of plates for one cell.

A supply of sheet lead, minium, and woollen cloth was at once obtained, and the whole laboratory corps of students and staff was set to work to manufacture secondary batteries. A small Siemens-Halske dynamo was telegraphed for to charge the cells, and the ventilating steam-engine of the University was requisitioned to drive the dynamo during the night.

Thus the University stokers and engineer were put on double s.h.i.+fts; the cells were charged during the night and the charging current and battery-potential measured at intervals.

Then the cells were run down during the day, and their output measured in the same way. Just as this began, Thomson was laid up with an ailment which confined him to bed for a couple of weeks or so; but this led to no cessation of the laboratory activity. On the contrary, the laboratory corps was divided into two squads, one for the night, the other for the day, and the work of charging and discharging, and of measurement of expenditure and return of energy went on without intermission. The results obtained during the day were taken to Thomson's bedside in the evening, and early in the morning he was ready to review those which had been obtained during the night, and to suggest further questions to be answered without delay. This mode of working could not go on indefinitely, but it continued until his a.s.sistants (some of whom had to take both s.h.i.+fts!), to say nothing of the stokers and students, were fairly well exhausted.

On other occasions, when he was from home, he found the post too slow to convey his directions to his laboratory workers, and telegraphed from day to day questions and instructions regarding the work on hand. Thus one important result (antic.i.p.ated, however, by Villari) of the series of researches on the effects of stress on magnetisation which forms Part VII of his _Electrodynamic Qualities of Metals_--the fact that up to a certain magnetising force the effect of pull, applied to a wire of soft iron, is to increase the magnetisation produced, and for higher magnetising forces to diminish it--was telegraphed to him on the night on which the paper was read to the Royal Society.

It will thus be seen that Thomson, whether confined to his room or on holiday, kept his mind fixed upon his scientific or practical work, and was almost impatient for its progress. Stokes worked mainly by himself; but even if he had had a corps of workers and a.s.sistants, it is improbable that such disturbances of hours of attendance and laboratory and workshop routine would have occurred, as were not infrequent at Glasgow when Thomson's work was, in the 'sixties and 'seventies, at its intensest.

Stokes and Thomson were in succession presidents of the Royal Society, Stokes from 1885 to 1890, and Thomson (from 1892 as Lord Kelvin) from 1890 to 1895. This is the highest distinction which any scientific man in this country can achieve, and it is very remarkable that there should have been in recent times two presidents in succession whose modes of thought and mathematical power are so directly comparable with those of the great founder of modern natural philosophy. Stokes had the additional distinction of being the lineal successor of Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. But it was reserved for Thomson to do much by the publication of Thomson and Tait's _Natural Philosophy_ to bring back the current of teaching and thought in dynamical science to the ideas of the Principia, and to show how completely the fundamental laws, as laid down in that great cla.s.sic, avail for the inclusion of the modern theory of energy, in all its transformations, within the category of dynamical action between material systems.

An exceedingly eminent politician, now deceased, said some years ago that the present age was singularly deficient in minds of the first quality. So far as scientific genius is concerned, the dictum was singularly false: we have here a striking proof of the contrary. But then few politicians know anything of science; indeed some of those who guide, or aspire to guide, the destinies of the most scientific and industrial empire the world has ever seen are almost boastful of their ignorance. There are, of course, honourable exceptions.

It is convenient to refer here to the share which Stokes and Thomson took in the physical explanation of the dark lines of the solar spectrum, and to their prediction of the possibility of determining the const.i.tution of the stars and of terrestrial substances by what is now known as spectrum a.n.a.lysis. Thomson used to give the physical theory of these lines in his lectures, and say that he obtained the idea from Stokes in a conversation which they had in the garden of Pembroke at Cambridge, "some time prior to 1852" (see the quotation from his Nature article quoted above, p. 80, and the _Baltimore Lectures_, p. 101). This is confirmed by a student's note-book, of date 1854, which is now in the Natural Philosophy Department. The statements therein recorded are perfectly definite and clear, and show that at that early date the whole affair of spectrum a.n.a.lysis was in his hands, and only required confirmation by experiments on the reversal of the lines of terrestrial substances by an atmosphere of the substance which produced the lines, and a comparison of the positions of the bright lines of terrestrial substances with those of the dark lines of the solar spectrum. Why Thomson did not carry out all these experiments it would be difficult to say. Some of them he did make, for Professor John Ferguson, who was a student of Natural Philosophy in 1859-60, has recently told how he witnessed Thomson make the experiment of reversing the lines of sodium by pa.s.sing the light from the salted flame of a spirit lamp through vapour of sodium produced by heating the metal in an iron spoon. A few days later, says Professor Ferguson, Thomson read a letter to his cla.s.s announcing Bunsen and Kirchhoff's discovery.

A letter of Stokes to Sir John Lubbock, printed in the _Scientific Correspondence of Sir George Gabriel Stokes_, states his recollection of the matter, and gives Thomson the credit of having inferred the method of spectrum a.n.a.lysis, a method to which Stokes himself makes no claim.

He says, "I know, I think, what Sir William Thomson was alluding to. I knew well, what was generally known, and is mentioned by Herschel in his treatise on Light, that the bright D seen in flames is specially produced when a salt of soda is introduced. I connected it in my own mind with the presence of sodium, and I suppose others did so too. The coincidence in position of the bright and dark D is too striking to allow us to regard it as fortuitous. In conversation with Thomson I explained the connection of the dark and bright line by the a.n.a.logy of a set of piano strings tuned to the same note, which, if struck, would give out that note, and also would be ready to sound it, to take it up, in fact, if it were sounded in air. This would imply absorption of the aerial vibrations, as otherwise there would be a creation of energy.

Accordingly I accounted for the presence of the dark D in the solar spectrum by supposing that there was sodium in the atmosphere, capable of absorbing light of that particular refrangibility. He asked me if there were any other instances of such coincidences of bright and dark lines, and I said I thought there was one mentioned by Brewster. He was much struck with this, and jumped to the conclusion that to find out what substances were in the stars we must compare the positions of the dark lines seen in their spectra with the spectra of metals, etc....

"I should have said that I thought Thomson was going too fast ahead, for my notion at the time was that, though a few of the dark lines might be traced to elementary substances, sodium for one, probably pota.s.sium for another, yet the great bulk of them were probably due to compound vapours, which, like peroxide of nitrogen and some other known compound gases, have the character of selective absorption."

It will be remembered that the experimental establishment of the method of spectrum a.n.a.lysis was published towards the end of 1859 by Bunsen and Kirchhoff, to whom, therefore, the full credit of discoverers must be given.

Lord Kelvin in the later years of his life used to tell the story of his first meeting with Joule at Oxford, and of their second meeting a fortnight later in Switzerland. He did so also in his address delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of Joule, in Manchester Town Hall, on December 7, 1893, and we quote the narrative on account of its scientific and personal interest. "I can never forget the British a.s.sociation at Oxford in 1847, when in one of the sections I heard a paper read by a very una.s.suming young man, who betrayed no consciousness in his manner that he had a great idea to unfold. I was tremendously struck with the paper. I at first thought it could not be true, because it was different from Carnot's theory, and immediately after the reading of the paper I had a few words with the author, James Joule, which was the beginning of our forty years' acquaintance and friends.h.i.+p. On the evening of the same day, that very valuable inst.i.tution of the British a.s.sociation, its conversazione, gave us opportunity for a good hour's talk and discussion over all that either of us knew of thermodynamics. I gained ideas which had never entered my mind before, and I thought I, too, suggested something worthy of Joule's consideration when I told him of Carnot's theory. Then and there in the Radcliffe Library, Oxford, we parted, both of us, I am sure, feeling that we had much more to say to one another and much matter for reflection in what we had talked over that evening. But ... a fortnight later, when walking down the valley of Chamounix, I saw in the distance a young man walking up the road towards me, and carrying in his hand something which looked like a stick, but which he was using neither as an alpenstock nor as a walking-stick. It was Joule with a long thermometer in his hand, which he would not trust by itself in the _char-a-banc_, coming slowly up the hill behind him, lest it should get broken. But there, comfortably and safely seated in the _char-a-banc_, was his bride--the sympathetic companion and sharer in his work of after years. He had not told me in Section A, or in the Radcliffe Library, that he was going to be married in three days, but now in the valley of Chamounix he introduced me to his young wife. We appointed to meet again a fortnight later at Martigny to make experiments on the heat of a waterfall (Sallanches) with that thermometer: and afterwards we met again and again, and from that time, indeed, remained close friends till the end of Joule's life. I had the great pleasure and satisfaction for many years, beginning just forty years ago, of making experiments along with Joule which led to some important results in respect to the theory of thermodynamics. This is one of the most valuable recollections of my life, and is indeed as valuable a recollection as I can conceive in the possession of any man interested in science."

At the beginning of his course of lectures each session, Professor Thomson read, or rather attempted to read, an introductory address on the scope and methods of physical science, which he had prepared for his first session in 1846. It set forth the fact that in science there were two stages of progress--a natural history stage and a natural philosophy stage. In the first the discoverer or teacher is occupied with the collection of facts, and their arrangement in cla.s.ses according to their nature; in the second he is concerned with the relations of facts already discovered and cla.s.sified, and endeavours to bring them within the scope of general principles or causes. Once the philosophical stage is reached, its methods and results are connected and enlarged by continued research after facts, controlled and directed by the conclusions of general theory. Thus the method is at first purely inductive, but becomes in the second stage both inductive and deductive; the general theory predicts by its deductions, and the verification of these by experiment and observation give a validity to the theory which no mere induction could afford. These stages of scientific investigation are well ill.u.s.trated by the laws of Kepler arrived at by mere comparison of the motions of the planets, and the deduction of these laws, with the remarkable correction of the third law, given by the theory of universal gravitation. The prediction of the existence and place of the planet Neptune from the perturbations of Ura.n.u.s is an excellent example of the predictive quality of a true philosophical theory.

The lecture then proceeded to state the province of dynamics, to define its different parts, and to insist on the importance of kinematics, which was described as a purely geometrical subject, the geometry of motion, considerations from which entered into every dynamical problem. This distinction between dynamical and kinematical considerations--between those in which force is concerned and those into which enter only the idea of displacement in s.p.a.ce and in time--is emphasised in Thomson and Tait's _Natural Philosophy_, which commences with a long chapter devoted entirely to kinematics.

Whether Professor Thomson read the whole of the Introductory Lecture on the first occasion is uncertain--Clerk Maxwell is said to have a.s.serted that it was closely adhered to, for that one time only, and finished in much less than the hour allotted to it. In later years he had never read more than a couple of pages when some new ill.u.s.tration, or new fact of science, which bore on his subject, led him to digress from the ma.n.u.script, which was hardly ever returned to, and after a few minutes was mechanically laid aside and forgotten. Once on beginning the session he humorously informed the a.s.sembled cla.s.s that he did not think he had ever succeeded in reading the lecture through before, and added that he had determined that they should hear the whole of it! But again occurred the inevitable digression, in the professor's absorption in the new topic the promise was forgotten, and the written lecture fared as before! These digressions were exceedingly interesting to the best students: whether they compensated for the want of a carefully prepared presentation of the elements of the subject, suited to the wants of the ma.s.s of the members of the cla.s.s, is a matter which need not here be discussed. All through his elementary lectures--introductory or not--new ideas and new problems continually presented themselves. An eminent physicist once remarked that Thomson was perhaps the only living man who made discoveries while lecturing. That was hardly true; in the glow of action and stress of expression the mind of every intense thinker often sees new relations, and finds new points of view, which amount to discoveries. But fecundity of mind has, of course, its disadvantages: the unexpected cannot happen without causing distractions to all concerned. A mind which can see a theory of the physical universe in a smoke-ring is likely, unless kept under extraordinary and hampering restraint, to be tempted to digress from what is strictly the subject in hand, to the world of matters which that subject suggests. Professor Thomson was, it must be admitted, too discursive for the ordinary student, and perhaps did not study the art of boiling down physical theories to the form most easily digestible. His eagerness of mind and width of mental outlook gave his lectures a special value to the advanced student, so that there was a compensating advantage.

The teacher of natural philosophy is really placed in a position of extraordinary difficulty. The fabric of nature is woven without seam, and to take it to pieces is in a manner to destroy it. It must, after examination in detail, be reconstructed and considered as a whole, or its meaning escapes us. And here lies the difficulty: every bit of matter stands in relation to everything else, and both sides of every relation must be considered. In other words, in the explanation of any one phenomenon the explanation of all others is more or less involved.

This does not mean that investigation or exposition is impossible, or that we cannot proceed step by step; but it shows the foolishness of that criticism of science and scientific method which asks for complete or ultimate knowledge, and of the popular demand for a simple form of words to express what is in reality infinitely complex.