PETER GUTHRIE TAIT. 163 



PETER GUTHRIE TAIT. 



BY C. K. EDMUNDS, 



JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 



"VTEXT to Lord Kelvin, perhaps the most notable figure among the 

 -^ physicists of Great Britain during the past forty years has been 

 Peter Guthrie Tait, professor of natural philosophy in the University 

 of Edinburgh since 1860. One of the first to establish laboratory 

 instruction in Great Britain, and beginning his career at a time when 

 the now prevalent ideas of energy were yet unborn, he has had much to 

 do with the shaping of scientific thought and education during the 

 latter half of the nineteenth century. 



He was born at Dalkeith (a town of several thousand inhabitants, 

 about six miles southeast of Edinburgh) in 1831. His early education 

 was obtained at the Dalkeith Grammar School and at the Circus Place 

 School in Edinburgh. Tait was a distinguished pupil, and those of his 

 schoolfellows who are still alive speak of him with so much love and 

 respect that he must have been a leader among them. Clerk Maxwell 

 was his most intimate school and college friend, and the friendship thus 

 begun continued till Maxwell's death, undisturbed by the fact that they 

 were rivals for the Edinburgh chair in 1860. 'Both were men of 

 playful disposition and of absolute frankness and sincerity.' 



Tait studied at Edinburgh University for one session under Kelland 

 and Forbes, and the promise he then gave was amply fulfilled at St. 

 Peter's College, Cambridge, where he became senior wrangler and first 

 Smith's Prizeman in 1852, being just twenty-one years of age. His 

 private tutor was William Hopkins, to whose tuition Tait attributed 

 much of his mathematical skill. Tait seems to have joined heartily in 

 all phases of undergraduate life at Peterhouse. He was a keen golfer, 

 and for forty years he spent an annual holiday on the links at St. 

 Andrew's. It is said that his son's progress to the championship in golf 

 was dearer to him than his own scientific fame. And some declare that 

 the untimely death of his son, an officer in the Black Watch in the 

 South African War, hastened his father's last illness, to which he suc- 

 cumbed on July 4, 1901, at seventy years of age. 



In 1854 Tait was appointed professor of mathematics in Queen's 

 College, Belfast, and became acquainted with Andrews, the chemist, 

 and Rowan Hamilton, the mathematician. Andrews stimulated his love 

 for physical research and helped him to gain the power of apprehend- 

 ing the facts and of plainly formulating the theories of natural philos- 



