SKETCH OF HE IN RICH HERTZ. 403 



tions was the exceptionally fine and well-endowed laboratory of 

 the institution, Avhich furnished the most desirable facilities for 

 unlimited experimenting. At Karlsruhe Prof. Hertz found a 

 wife who was in every way a lovely and graceful, devoted and 

 highly intellectual companion to him. His life was from this 

 time on divided between the pursuit of his main object, the 

 progress of science, and home happiness ; both he and his wife 

 derived rare gratification from literature and the beauty of 

 Nature. It was from Karlsruhe that he went to Heidelberg, 

 there to enjoy the proudest moment of his life, in the year 

 1889, wlien, greeted with enthusiastic applause by most promi- 

 nent scientists, he stood up on the platform to tender an account 

 of his researches and their results. Who that saw him there, the 

 very picture of youthful vigor and life, could have foreboded that 

 those fine and penetrating eyes, to which for the first time since 

 our earth turned around its poles electric waves had been re- 

 vealed, were so soon to be closed in death ! 



Soon Prof. Hertz received flattering calls to the most promi- 

 nent universities ; he preferred the smaller town of Bonn, where 

 he settled down in 1890, even to Berlin, the capital, because what 

 he sought after was the most serious and fruitful work, not glory 

 and outward advantage. In Bonn he succeeded to the eminent 

 physicist, Prof. Clausius; this was in itself a high distinction 

 conferred upon so young a man as Prof. Hertz. Considered all 

 over Europe as one of the most prominent, he was looked up to 

 as one of the most promising leaders in the science of electricity. 

 Not only had his own country conferred high honors upon this 

 young and ardent worker, but the chief academies of England, 

 France, Italy, Austria, and Russia now crowned his efforts with 

 prizes, honorary memberships, and other tokens of universal 

 esteem and gratitude. 



Up to the middle of this century the phenomena of electricity 

 and magnetism had been only inadequately explained by apply- 

 ing to them Newton's law of gravitation and asserting that, in 

 the same way as celestial bodies exercise power of attraction at a 

 distance and without the intervention of a medium, the two 

 kinds of material electricity were attracting and repelling each 

 other, while passing through space or through non-conductors. 



It was the great English physicist Faraday who first sought 

 to carry the knowledge of electricity to a higher stage, by enter- 

 ing upon the study of phenomena with a mind free from precon- 

 ceived opinions. He put forth as the foundation on which tcv 

 base new theories his observations of electric and magnetic forces,, 

 their influence upon each other, their attractions for material 

 bodies, and their propagation by the transmission of the excita- 

 tion from one point of space to another. He questioned the 



